Calling All Developers!

For all you developers out there, you’ll be happy to know that you can now build applications that leverage the power of MSN Search through our new MSN Search Web Service.  Our new SOAP Web Service offers an enormous 10,000 queries per application per day, and because the MSN Search Web Service automatically allocates a separate quota to each IP address, users of your application don’t need to sign up for anything for your app to work!  Using the API is simple.  First, sign up for an ApplicationID using your Passport (you can sign up for as many ApplicationIDs as you’d like).  Next, simply call the MSNSearchService() API, passing in the ApplicationID you just generated.  That’s it.  You can get back Web Search and spelling results and easily integrate them into your applications.  Take a look at ProgrammableWeb’s “Web 2.0 API Reference” for some ideas of other services to work with.

As is the case with all Web Services, it’s easy to consume the MSN Search Web Service in both Visual Studio .NET 2003 and Beta 2 of Visual Studio 2005 – simply add a Web Reference in the Solution Explorer and begin programming!  For more details, take a look at the Getting Started with MSN Search Web Services article on our new MSN Developer Center on MSDN.  The Developer Center has a ton of information on the tools and technologies you can use to develop applications that interact with MSN services and data such as start.com, MSN Messenger and Virtual Earth.

Seth Demsey, Group Program Manager, MSN Search