Bing Search versus API

I'm getting different results between an actual BING search and an API call:


http://api.search.live.net/xml.aspx?Appid=YOURAPPCODE&sources=web&Web.count=30&query=site%3Asilvatechsolutions.com

If you search for site:silvatechsolutions.com on bing, you'll get a lot more results.  What am I missing in the api query? 

I'm running into the same problem.  As an example, this API call returns 15 results:

api.search.live.net/xml.aspx

The same search on Bing's public site returns 51 results:

www.bing.com/search

Searching simply for my site using the API returns 34 results:

api.search.live.net/xml.aspx

Bing's public site returns 255 results:

www.bing.com/search

Most of the pages on my site have existed for months, if not years.  It doesn't bother me that the API results don't exactly match the public results; what bothers me is that only a little better than 13% of the pages Bing's public site claims exist on my site show up in the API.

Any word from the good folks at Bing why there's some a vast difference?

Absolutely no word.  Its has been very nice that the API is so open and documented as compared to Google.  Without accurate results, the API is as good as useless though.

I (as well as many other people) are seeing the same issue, there is definitely an inconsistency somewhere, and for me it doesn't matter if I try XML or JSON. The weird thing is, one server gets the right links, but my other server does not:

Both servers used the same exact query, to me it looks like the only different is the hostname lookup for api.search.live.net returns two different networks (probably because one server is in Los Angeles and the other is in Newark):

Server 1 - Newark (correct results): nslookup on api.search.live.net:

Name: a1634.g.akamai.net

Address: 72.246.94.32

Name: a1634.g.akamai.net

Address: 72.246.94.51

Server 2 - Los Angeles (incorrect results): nslookup on api.search.live.net:

Name:   a1634.g.akamai.net

Address: 173.223.52.186

Name:   a1634.g.akamai.net

Address: 173.223.52.217

I wonder if there is an issue with some of Microsoft's content and/or servers not being in-sync with each other?

@jts1978:  thanks for the feedback.  I agree--Bing is very generous, but the API's perfomance has been lacking for me at least.

@methodic:  interesting observation.  That would explain why some folks get good performance from the API, while others (like me) don't get the results they expect.

I've implemented a different solution for site search right now, but I'll keep an eye on the Bing API and may switch back if the incomplete results issue gets resolved.  My thanks to both of you for your feedback!

@kevinblackston, would it be possible to let me know what open source tool you used?

@jts1978:  it's a PHP/MySQL project called Sphider (www.sphider.eu).  Doesn't appear to have been updated much the past couple of years, though I saw there's a non-free fork that's being maintained.  I did run into a couple of small issues getting things set up--possibly related to my version of PHP--but those were resolved by searching the Sphider forum.

We are having the same issue.  It would be nice if Microsoft would provide some suggestions or help.  

I have written an email to the api-support (api_tou@microsoft.com) and got the following answer:

----------------------------------------------------

Both the Bing API and Bing.com use the same index. However due to differences in the intermediate layers of the services, the results will not necessarily be the same.  

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My only problem is that I still have no solution :-(

I'm having exactly the same kind of problem. Is there any workaround apart from directly making a query to bing.com without using AppId? This is really annoying.

It is the market parameter. Bing detects the market parameter based on your API , and I guess that the market parameter you are using is different from the Bing website. Also can be another parameters like adult and etc.