Today we are excited to announce the availability of Bing Entity Search API, a new Microsoft Cognitive Service in Free Preview. While in Preview, it will be available within the United States.

Bing Entity Search API (Preview) helps you enrich your app with the knowledge of the web. It lets you access the ever-growing Bing knowledge graph which consists of billions of real world entities like people, places, things and local businesses. When your app users need supplemental information on the content in your app, having to leave your app to run a separate query is not optimal. You can use Bing knowledge graph to bring search within your experience.

Bing Entity Search API is the new addition in our already existing set of Microsoft Cognitive Services Search APIs, including Bing Web Search, Image Search, Video Search, News Search, Bing Autosuggest and Bing Custom Search. This API lets you search for entities in the Bing knowledge graph and retrieve the most relevant entities and primary details and information sources about them. This API also supports searching for Local Businesses in the United States. It helps developers easily build apps that harness the power of the web and delight users with more engaging contextual experiences.

Search Most Relevant Entity

Bing Entity Search API provides the ability to search for the most relevant entities that span across multiple segments like people, places, things, movies, books and local businesses.

For example, if you search for “Satya Nadella”, you get a single dominant entity corresponding to the Microsoft CEO. Likewise if you search for “Seattle Seahawks” you will get details about the American football team of Seattle Seahawks.

This API also lets you search for local businesses and locations in the United States. You can perform searches like “restaurants near me”, “Mexican restaurants in Bellevue” or “Starbucks” to get the ranked list of the most relevant local businesses that match the user’s interest. You can also search for a specific local business by providing a more specific query string like “El Gaucho Bellevue”.

Augment your content with Entity Information

Bing Entity Search API provides core details and information sources about the entities that you can make available to augment your user experiences. If you search for any entity, the result includes basic details like Name, Image, Description and its Category. If you search for local businesses, users can see Name, Phone Number, Category, City, State, Zip Code etc.

Let’s say you are writing a blog post with your review on some movie. You might refer to multiple entities like actors, other movies etc. in your blog. You can augment those entities by making entity search results from Bing Entity Search API available to users from within your blog. This makes your content richer and can help keep your user within your experience.

Get Started

Bing Entity Search API is available for free. You can get started using Bing Entity Search API within just a few minutes.

Test some queries out for yourself using our demo app.

To get a free trial subscription key, simply go to the Microsoft Cognitive Services Try Page and sign up for Bing Entity Search API. The API is available for free in Preview mode.

The Bing Entity Search API is another example of how we at Bing are working to build innovative APIs that allow developers to harness the power of the web for their users. Because the API is in its preview stage, we are looking to you for feedback to help us take it further and better meet your needs.

If you have feedback or questions about our APIs, please comment on Stack Overflow.

Saurabh Shrivastava
Senior Program Manager
Bing and Cortana Ecosystem Team