Powering Search on PHP Web Sites with Bing

The Bing Search and Decision engine offers a comprehensive Application Programming Interface (API) that enables developers to programmatically submit queries to and retrieve results from the Bing Engine. If you are a PHP developer and looking for a way to easily enable the search feature on your website, you are in luck. Today, we’re pleased to introduce a new Bing Search Library for PHP,available on Codeplex.com, http://bingphp.codeplex.com, under an open source BSD license.

For this project, Microsoft worked with Cal Evans, a seasoned PHP developer. The goal was to build this library following the appropriate PHP conventions and coding styles. So, Cal designed and wrote the code of the library for us, and he has just posted a tutorial with some sample code for PHP developers to quickly get started. Try it!

The Bing Search Library for PHP is a wrapper on top of the Bing API, which provides a simple way to submit queries to and retrieve results from the Bing Engine.

There are many ways to take advantage of the Bing API, since the API offers a choice of protocols from JSON, plain XML, to SOAP. So if you want to dig deeper into the Bing API, start here: http://www.bing.com/developers. In fact readers of this blog might recall the Bing 404 Web Page Error Toolkit for PHP project we presented a few months ago. This project focused on helping PHP developers use Microsoft Bing search engine to manage the 404 error (Page Not Found) on their web sites.

As always, if you have feedback, questions, or feature requests, please join us on the project site: http://bingphp.codeplex.com

Sumit Chawla, Technical PM/Architect, Microsoft Interoperability Strategy Team