New Enhancements to Bing Custom Search

Today we are happy to announce the release of additions and enhancements to the Bing Custom Search product. These new additions will enable developers and non-developers to further harness the power of the web by allowing them to build an even more powerful and customizable search experience.

At Microsoft, AI is playing a critical role in transforming businesses around the world by enabling more informed and smarter user experiences. 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. We have been prioritizing new features and enhancements based on the feedback received since we announced the General Availability of Bing Custom Search v1 in October 2017. In May 2018, we released Bing Custom Search v2 with important new features like: custom image search, custom autosuggest, and a means for retrieving key insights regarding the usage of the custom search instance.

What's new in Bing Custom Search

Today, as a part of Bing Custom Search v3, we are happy to announce the release of the following new features and additions:

  • Bing Custom Search now supports Video – Search video results from web sources that have been configured in your Bing Custom Search instance.
  • More options to fine-tune and customize pre-defined color themes in Hosted UI.
  • Enhancing the ability to pin specific web results to specific queries by supporting pinning queries that start with or end with a phrase/term instead of only exact matching.
  • Ability to block specific queries from the auto-generated query suggestions.

Today’s announcements reflect Microsoft’s commitment to make AI accessible to everybody – developers and non-developers, small businesses and enterprises. We hope the Bing Custom Search v3 enhancements will help create an even more powerful site search or vertical search experience and bring new information discovery mechanisms for your users.

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.

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.

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

- Bing API Team