Why is Bing search API not returning correct number of results?

jamesh 1

I'm trying to page through and get hundreds of results at once, but the API isn't returning the correct count.

1st call: 50 results
2nd call: 21 results
3rd call: 20 results
4th call: 20 results
5th call: 11 results
6th call: 8 results

The API estimates 4360000 matches, so this seems wrong. I'm using API v7 with tier S2.

Does anyone know what might be causing this? Thanks!

romungi-MSFT 41,866 Reputation points Microsoft Employee

2022-08-08T07:37:13.283+00:00

@jamesh Total estimated matches is an estimated number (not exact) of webpages that are relevant to the query. It is expected that the number might differ between API calls. It is also expected that the number would change as you page through the results (using the offset parameter).

Also, The Bing Web Search API returns search results that can include webpages, images, videos, and news. When you page through search results from the Bing Web Search API, you are paging only WebPages, and not other answer types such as images or news. Search results in WebPage objects may include results that appear in other answer types as well.

Ref: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/cognitive-services/Bing-Web-Search/paging-search-results#paging-through-search-results
jamesh 1 Reputation point

2022-08-13T18:51:16.333+00:00

So is there a way to retrieve 50 webpages per transaction? Like, a parameter, or a different API tier?

I'm confused, because the S2 tier is documented as not including video/images/news, according to this table: https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/pricing/details/cognitive-services/search-api/.

Thanks!
romungi-MSFT 41,866 Reputation points Microsoft Employee

2022-08-16T09:16:05.127+00:00

To display 50 results per page, you would set count to 50 and offset to 0 to get the first page of results. For each subsequent API call, you would increment offset by 50.
The pricing page is indicative of the ability to call the respective feature or API of the search service. The estimated results would still include results from all the types.