API Announcement: Local Business Search Public Preview

Today, we are announcing Bing Local Business Search in public preview as our latest addition to our existing portfolio of Search APIs on the Cognitive Services platform.

The Cognitive Services platform hosts a variety of prebuilt Artificial Intelligence (AI) capabilities that provide production ready REST APIs to solve problems in various domains such as vision, speech, language, knowledge, and search. The Bing Search APIs on Cognitive Services provide capabilities to search for webpages, images, videos, and news across billions of documents hosted across the web. We are excited to see what new business opportunities these offerings will open up for our customers.

Public Preview: Bing Local Business Search API

Bing Local Business Search API helps users search for local businesses in a given area of interest. This service enables your users to easily find local business information from Bing’s industry-leading index within your applications and websites.

By using this service, your user is able to search for information on millions of local businesses from hundreds of categories including Food & Drink, Professionals & Services, Retail, Healthcare, and more. User queries can be pertaining to a single entity, such as “Microsoft City Center Plaza Bellevue” or a collection of results like “Microsoft Offices In Redmond WA”. Category queries, such as “Italian Restaurant” are also supported. Alternatively, users can use one of our predefined categories to query our API. You can find more information on how to call the API and supported scenarios in our detailed developer resources.

Below is an example JSON response. Each result item contains name, full address, phone number, website, business category, and latitude/longitude. Using these results, you can build engaging user scenarios in your applications. For instance, you could enable users to find and contact a local business. Another example is to enable navigation to the place of interest or plotting results on Bing Maps. An example from Bing.com for “City Center Plaza Microsoft” query is shown below.

Bing Local Business Search API JSON response

Figure 1. Sample response in JSON and manifestation on Bing.com

Subscribe today to try Local Business Search API for free or visit Azure Cognitive Services page to learn more about this offering.

As always, we are excited to see what applications you build and how Bing APIs help you do more with your business. For any ideas or suggestions, please reach out to us at User Voice or share your feedback with Azure Support. Additionally, visit our Bing for Partners website to learn more about all of our Bing API offerings, as well as join our LinkedIn Bing APIs group for more news and updates.

- Bing APIs Team