Bing Custom Search: Build a Customized Site Search in Just a Few Minutes

It’s a little over 5 months since we launched the Bing Custom Search for general availability, and we're happy to see a considerable number of websites around the world that are now powered by Bing Custom Search.

You can use the Bing Custom Search offering for either powering your site search or building the vertical search experience through multiple relevant domains. If you believe in delighting your users and want to integrate customized Search AI capabilities into your application, then this blog post is for you.

What is Bing Custom Search API?

Bing Custom Search is an easy-to-use, ad-free search solution that enables users to build a search experience and query content on their specific site, or across a hand-picked set of websites or domains.  To help users surface the results they want, Bing Custom Search provides a simple web interface where users can control ranking specifics and pin or block responses to suit their needs.

Our goal is to empower both developers and non-developers to harness the power of the web by allowing them to build a customized search engine experience. Setting up a custom search instance is easy and quick. For customers who don’t have resources to invest in development efforts, we offer an easy to use Hosted UI solution at no additional cost.

Bing Custom Search API – Key Points

  • Ads-free search experience for your website.
  • Complete control over which domains, subsites, or webpages to surface results from. This will enable you to build a tailored search experience for different topics for any industry type (e.g., health, entertainment, retail, finance etc.) that your application demands.
  • Ability to block, pin, promote, demote, and boost search results.
  • Ability to upload domains of your interest in a batch.
  • Leverage auto spell correction feature to accurately correct spelling and display the right results to your users.
  • Ability to rename, clone and delete an instance.
  • Flexibility to use either an API Endpoint to retrieve JSON response or use our free Hosted UI for your search experience.
  • Free access keys to explore, tweak, and configure your search instance followed by a pay-as-you-go subscription.
  • Trusted indexing and relevance capabilities of Bing.

How it works

Bing Custom Search leverages the powerful indexing and relevance capabilities of the Bing search engine while allowing users to customize their search experience. Whether you're building a site-search engine or trying to query content across an industry vertical, Custom Search enables users to control exactly how their search instance operates.  Bing Custom Search leverages Bing to index content, so no matter how information is stored or hosted, if it’s publicly available on the web, we can find it. Bing Custom Search can be used in few effortless self-explanatory steps as follows:

Bing Custom Search steps

Check out our Channel 9 video to see how you can create a new Custom Search instance in minutes:

Also, please refer to this link for the step-by-step process for creating a custom search instance.

Documentation

To learn more about Bing Custom Search API, please visit this link here. For getting started in C#, Java, Node.js, or Python languages, see our Quickstarts. For more detailed onboarding and hosted UI information, visit our Tutorial section. Also, please watch our short online demo about Bing Custom Search API here.

For those who want to try out Custom Search before a purchase, we provide Free Access Keys where users can configure, tweak and test their instance before deployment. Leverage Bing Custom Search to build delightful search experience for your users. We are working to launch a handful of new capabilities and flexibility in pricing in the coming weeks. Stay tuned for more updates.

For questions or feedback please reach out to us via Stack Overflow and Azure Support. We would also love to hear your feedback.

- Bing Team