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Use Bing Web Search API to search billions of web documents for content that's relevant to the user's search string.

It's easy. If you have your subscription key, just send an HTTP GET request to the following endpoint:

https://api.bing.microsoft.com/v7.0/search

Here's a cURL example that shows you how to call the endpoint using your subscription key. Change the q query parameter to search for whatever you'd like.

curl -H "Ocp-Apim-Subscription-Key: <yourkeygoeshere>" https://api.bing.microsoft.com/v7.0/search?q=microsoft+devices

Request and response headers

Although that's all you need to do to search the web, Bing suggests you include a couple of other headers to provide a better search experience for your user. Those headers include:

  • User-Agent — Lets Bing know whether needs a mobile or desktop experience.
  • X-MSEdge-ClientID — Provides continuity of experience.
  • X-MSEdge-ClientIP — Provides the user's location for location aware queries.
  • X-Search-Location — Provides the user's location for location aware queries.

The more information you can provide Bing, the better the search experience will be for your users. To learn more about these headers, see Request headers.

Here's a cURL example that includes these headers.

curl -H "Ocp-Apim-Subscription-Key: <yourkeygoeshere>" -H "X-MSEdge-ClientID: 00B4230B74496E7A13CC2C1475056FF4" -H "X-MSEdge-ClientIP: 11.22.33.44" -H "X-Search-Location: lat:55;long:-111;re:22" -A "Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/29.0.1547.65 Safari/537.36" https://api.bing.microsoft.com/v7.0/search?q=microsoft+devices

Bing returns a few headers you should capture.

  • BingAPIs-TraceId — The ID that identifies the request in the log file.
  • X-MSEdge-ClientID — The ID that you need to pass in subsequent request to provide continuity of experience.
  • BingAPIs-Market — The market used by Bing for the request.

To learn more about these headers, see Response headers.

Here's a cURL call that returns the response headers. If you want to remove the response data so you can see only the headers, include the -o nul parameter.

curl -D - -H "Ocp-Apim-Subscription-Key: <yourkeygoeshere>" https://api.bing.microsoft.com/v7.0/search?q=microsoft+devices

Query parameters

The only query parameter that you must pass is the q parameter, which you set to the user's query string. You must URL-encode the user's query string and all query parameter values that you pass.

The API supports a number of query parameters that you can pass in your request. Here's a list of the ones you're most likely to pass.

  • count and offset — Used to page webpage results. Read more
  • mkt — Used to specify the market where the results come from, which is typically the market where the user is making the request from.
  • safeSearch — Used to specify the user's safe search preference.
  • textDecorations and textFormat — Used to turn on hit highlighting. Read more

To learn more about these parameters and other parameters that you may specify, see Query parameters.

Here's a cURL example that includes these query parameters.

curl -H "Ocp-Apim-Subscription-Key: <yourkeygoeshere>" https://api.bing.microsoft.com/v7.0/search?q=microsoft+devices&mkt=en-us&safeSearch=moderate&textdecorations=true&textformat=raw&count=10&offset=0

For information about query parameters that you can use to filter the search results, see Filtering search results.

Next steps

  • Learn about the response that Bing returns for the user's query.
  • Learn how to get the next page of search results.
  • Learn what happens if you don't stay within your queries per second (QPS) limit. Hint: your requests get throttled.
  • Learn about the quickstarts and samples that are available to help you get up and running fast.