Phasing out the Bing Search API 1.1

UPDATE:

Following our announcement (8/6/2010) to discontinue support to Bing API 1.1, the API 1.1 service will go offline on Monday May 2, 2011 at 11:00AM PST.  What this means to you is that customers who have built search applications that leverage the API 1.1 will cease to return Bing search results.

To continue serving Bing search results, you will need to migrate your application to Bing API 2.0.  For migration resources and general API assistance, see the original post below.

Some time ago, we announced Bing Search API 2.0, a release which introduced a number of significant improvements (outlined below) over the older API 1.1.  While we continued to support the older version by incrementally updating supporting documentation, today marks the final step in what has been a gradual transition to a single Bing Search API.

As of November 1^st, 2010 we will discontinue support for the Bing Search API 1.1.  For those of you using the older API, this means that you will need to switch over to the newer API over the course of the next 3 months. To help make the switch to the new API as easy as possible, we have developed a number of resources which can be found here.  This includes implementation instructions, code examples, links to forums, and other helpful resources.

The considerable benefits that come from moving to the newer API include:

New SourceTypes

• RelatedSearch - view searches that provide information in which you might be interested, based on your current search
• Instant Answer - get authoritative answers to questions, such as "What is 789*12?", "How many seconds are in a year?" as well as airline flight status.
• MobileWeb - Get mobile Web search results - primarily Extensible Hypertext Markup Language (XHTML) or Wireless Markup Language (WML) pages relevant to the queried term.
• Video - Get videos relevant to your search terms.
• Translation - Translate terms or small blocks of text from one language to another

New Protocols

In this version, your application does not have to adapt to a single protocol. Instead, you can choose from a number of different protocols, including:

• JSON
• XML
• SOAP

Strong Typing

In this version, data returned is strongly typed and ready to be consumed. For example, an image or a weather forecast is an object - not just a title, a URL and a description.

The previous version had a single SearchRequest object that included all request parameters and a single SearchResponse that included all response fields. The fields in the response were populated or not based on the SourceTypes in the request.

In this version, every SourceType has its own request and response objects.

Developer portal

This version unveils a new Bing Developer Center, including new traffic management functionality.

Unlimited traffic

Version 2 offers new Terms of Use. Provided you comply with the stated terms, your applications can send an unlimited number of requests to the API.

There are other benefits of this transition as well.  The new Bing Search API introduced considerable improvements for maintenance and updates so that going forward, we can introduce feature improvements and other changes without switching API versions.  Furthermore, we will better able to aid you in your requests for assistance as there will now be a single version to monitor and support.  

As always, if you have any questions or need any guidance on any API issues, please reach out to api_tou@microsoft.com. 

Thanks for all your continued support,

Reed Shaffner

Senior Product Manager

Bing Developer Platform