Today at Build 2017, we announced the release of our latest addition to the Microsoft Cognitive Services portfolio – Bing Custom Search. Coming at a time when there is a demand for tailored search experiences, Bing Custom Search is an exciting new development.
Bing Custom Search is a commercial-grade solution that allows you to create a highly-customized web search experience that delivers dramatically better and more relevant results from a targeted web space. Now available as a free trial on the Microsoft Cognitive Services website, additional availability is planned for later this year.
In many ways, web search engines are now the gateways to information. By making it possible for you to create a custom web search service, Bing Custom Search opens up new possibilities for you to find knowledge about the things you deeply care about in many different ways. Our goal is to democratize access to information tailored to your area of interest and focused on a particular subset of the web.
While Bing Web Search API allows you to search over the entire web, Bing Custom Search allows you to select the slices of the web that you want to search over and control the ranking when searching over your targeted web space. You can programmatically retrieve your custom search results with Bing Web Search API , using an additional query parameter.
Build it quickly
With a straightforward UI, Bing Custom Search enables you to create your own web search engine without a line of code. Setting-up a web search becomes easy, fast and enjoyable.
The core technology works in three steps: it identifies on-topic sites, applies the Bing ranker and delivers relevant search results while allowing you to adjust the parameters at any time. You can specify the slices of the web to draw from and explore site suggestions to intelligently expand the scope of your search domain. Also, pin the websites that you care about most to the top, which will deliver dramatically better and more relevant search results for your area of interest.
Ultimately, Bing Custom Search allows you to leverage the power of Bing’s globally operating search backend (i.e., index, ranking and document processing) to build a search that fits your needs.
For example, if you are an enthusiastic bike touring blogger, you might want to have an awesome bike touring search integrated into your blog. Bing Custom Search allows you to build such a targeted search with only few steps.
It is very easy to plug the custom search solution into your blog and share it with like-minded people.
Ad free and commercial grade
Displaying the results retrieved via Custom Search is totally ad free – no matter how much or how little of the service you use. It empowers businesses of any size, hobbyists or entrepreneurs to design and deploy web search applications for any possible scenario. For example, enthusiasts can plug it into their private websites to create a web search for fellow enthusiasts, and businesses can leverage it to set up a high-coverage web search quickly and affordably.
As a commercial-grade solution, Bing Custom Search empowers you to design and deploy applicable search experiences for unlimited scenarios. Also, you have API access to your search results – giving you the capability to present the results as your customers want to receive them.
Get started
To get started with the Bing Custom Search, go to https://customsearch.ai, or Bing Custom Search on Azure to sign up for a trial key.
We are excited to introduce Bing Custom Search to the developer community and are eager to get feedback about how you are using custom search and what you would like to see in the service. The team is steadily working to make our APIs even better with each release, so we want to hear from you.
You can contact the team at bingcustomsearch@microsoft.com.
- The Bing Team