Azure Maps Fuzzy Search and Bing Autosuggest provide totally irrelevant results in comparison with real Bing Maps Search. Why?

Question

Hello Dear People,
Would anyone help with the next search issue?

I'm trying to find business points addresses by entering specific business point names:

• Google Maps search - returns relevant results - a few points nearby and so on... works fine for my task
• Bing Maps search - returns relevant results, as well
• my service, which uses Azure Maps Search (fuzzy) - totally not relevant results. It returns a point in another country but doesn't show point, which is in city nearby. Actually, in case of searching an address - all good, address exists and found, but it returned just as an address with no Business Point there (it's a huge business center building with a lot of offices inside). Any attempts to find that Business Point in other places/countries - fault.
• I've changed Search engine to Bing Autosuggest, it works better in some cases, but again - results are not relevant. It finds Business Points, but in India, Gemrany and other countries, but I couldn't find that one, which is nearby and found by Bing Maps and GMaps.

I was trying to play with typeahead, using my coordinates or not, using country set filter or not, user regions, and so on.. all attempts, which I built on Azure Maps Search or Bing Autosuggest are not showing correct results.

Next thing I've done to experiment - I took URL, which Bing Maps uses to autosuggest. This URL is different from documentation. In documentation it was:

http://dev.virtualearth.net/REST/v1/Autosuggest

In Bing Maps and Samples I've found another one:

https://www.bing.com/api/v6/Places/AutoSuggest

But the last one needs appId, which I don't know where to obtain... Bing Dev gives me subsciption key only.

So next thing is very interesting:

• when I use appId from Bing Sample - it returns the same results as I get from the first URL(dev.virtualearth)
• when I use appId from Bing Maps - it returns awesome results.

I understand, that I cannot and I will not use params from Bing Maps in my project, but why we have this difference in results?
Why Bing Maps appId works much better? I made totally similar params for the query, the only one thing I was changing - that appId.

Answer 1

Lots to unpack here so will try and break it up into chunks:

Data providers of business listing data in general have a lot of restrictions on how their data can be used. This is the primary reason for inconsistencies between API's and also why you will always see better results on consumer sites like bing.com/maps than in developer API's (the same is true for google.com/maps and Google Maps developer APIs).

Bing Maps REST Autotsuggest API coverage

The Bing Maps REST Autotsuggest API is also limited to US, CA, AU, IN, DE, ES, IT and BRSo this API is unlike to find results in other countries.

Bing Places & AppId

The URLs with https://www.bing.com/api/v6/Places/AutoSuggest and appId aren't calling Bing Maps API's but the Bing Places API which is an internal Microsoft API provided by Bing Search. An appId for the Bing Search API's may work with this endpoint: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/bing/search-apis/bing-web-search/ Bing search has access to a lot more data that than the Bing Maps APIs due to licensing restrictions on data. For example, many business listing providers don't allow their data to be exposed through developer API's like Bing Maps. As a way to get around this, the Bing places API returns a subset of the data that is considered public domain which does not include coordinates. The Bing Maps Autosuggest module for the Web SDK wraps this API and manually geocodes the addresses separately on demand through a multistep process. The Bing Maps autosuggest REST API only returns business listing data that allows the original coordinates to be return (no multi-step process is done to geocode the data). This is likely the reason for the difference in results.

Other Bing Maps REST API with Business data

There are three other Bing Maps REST API's that have business data:

• https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/bingmaps/rest-services/locations/local-search - US only
• https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/bingmaps/rest-services/locations/location-recognition - Limited to Canada, Germany, Italy, Spain and USA
• https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/bingmaps/spatial-data-services/public-data-sources/pointsofinterest - fairly global data set. I believe this data comes from the main map data provider (TomTom) and is not enriched by Bing.

Azure Maps Search (fuzzy)

This Azure Maps v1 fuzzy search API is powered by TomTom and is not enriched by Bing, so it's unlikely to have as good data. That said, the fuzzy search API is likely to have the lowest accuracy with business results compared to some of the other Azure Maps search services as handles a mix of inputs (addresses, points of interests, and point of interest categories. There are several other Azure Maps services that you should test that will likely be a bit better:

• POI search API - API specifically designed for finding business and points of interest.
• Nearby search API - Allows you to find business listings that are within a certain distance of a coordinate.
• [Search inside polygon API](https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/rest/api/maps/search/post-search-inside-geometry?view=rest-maps-1.0&tabs=HTTP - Find point of interest results within a polygon area.

Azure Maps V2 search services

In the past year Azure Maps has started releasing new search API's under V2. These API's appear to be expose the same data as Bing Maps API's. Currently the API's are limited to address geocoding and reverse geocoding, but I would expect other Bing location APIs/data to make their way into here in the future.