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Microsoft Will Soon Start Charging For Its Bing Search API
- rlpb 15y agoAre there any implications for DDG here?
- notatoad 15y agoi believe that DDG accesses the Bing indices through the Yahoo BOSS API, and yahoo already pays microsoft.
- eli 15y agoThat does not seem like a stable long-term arrangement, but what do I know.
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- mda 15y agoDoes anybody know what percentage of queries in DDG site is answered by bing?
- guimarin 15y agoso long as you're not doing a !bang specialized query, all of them.
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- tcwc 15y agoThis happened a few years ago when Yahoo BOSS started charging, back then Gabriel said they'd moved over to Bing (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1612081 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1612081). I'm sure they still make heavy use of the Bing API, but have since expanded their range of sources to soften the blow somewhat. They're now getting results from Blekko (who run their own index), and are I'm sure they've been building out their own index. There's a full list of sources here - http://help.duckduckgo.com/customer/portal/articles/216399-sources http://help.duckduckgo.com/customer/portal/articles/216399-s.... We also don't have any pricing details for higher volume usage of Bing, and DDG are in a much better position to negotiate a better deal these days.
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- RyanMcGreal 15y agoProbably not a bad idea on balance. They're not going to capture market share in any case, so this may be the only way they can recover some revenue.
- cannuk 15y agoThis seems like an odd move. It's not like bing has any traction with developers at all. Wouldn't charging them make it even harder to gain traction? I am not familiar with thei API, what does it have over google that would make me pay for it?
- sycr 15y agoGoogle doesn't have a search API (it was long ago deprecated https://developers.google.com/web-search/ https://developers.google.com/web-search/). So the API itself is the advantage over Google in this case.
- buu700 15y agoDid you read the link you provided? They actually mentioned right at the top that they have a newer search API which is recommended (though I'll admit that I missed it too at first). https://developers.google.com/custom-search/v1/overview https://developers.google.com/custom-search/v1/overview
- franze 15y agothe "custom search API" does not deserve the "search" in it's name. it's a different index, it's crap, and you can't access it as a whole, but only whitelisted parts.... google does not have a search API, it has a sad excuse to a search API
- AznHisoka 15y agoyep you're right. Even the AJAX API they had a couple of years ago was a joke that gave completely different results than what you saw.
- sycr 15y agoYes, I did :). As mentioned below, it's not a comparable product. Custom Search is site-specific. It's an API for the "search this page using Google" forms you sometimes see on blogs and the like. It's not an API for "capital S" Google Search, while Bing's API really is their Search API.
- guimarin 15y agoNo surprise there. I wonder if all the faux search engines will have to start either crawling/indexing, or transition to Knowledge Engines ( I'm looking at you DDG ). Curious to see if this sparks people to start more search companies.
- dewitt 15y agoHaving been through similar decision making processes myself (with the Google Custom Search API, the Google Translate API, etc), this is just as likely an abuse mitigation technique as it is a revenue generation opportunity. Requiring even a modest at-cost fee for a web service does wonders to discourage all sorts of misuse, from wanton large-scale data mining, to blatant repacking and resale, to worse. (Heck, simply requiring a valid credit card alone helps.) And sadly no, simply having low quotas for free access doesn't entirely suffice. If there's material value to be extracted from a free service, you'd be amazed at the lengths people will go through to create large numbers of low-volume scrapers. Most of these are obvious and easy to detect and defeat, but continually doing so adds up in cost, and it takes engineers away from providing better services to legitimate customers. In short, most people on the outside don't appreciate just how difficult the handful of bad guys make it for companies to do something good for the other 99%. So I'm sympathetic to Microsoft here, I really am.
- Aaronontheweb 15y agoThis. The best way to fight these types spammers and scrapers is through economics - provide the content at-cost and it no longer becomes cost-effective for pray-and-spray models. Imagine what the world would be like if there was a cost-per-unit to sending email - our inboxes would be a much saner, friendlier place. Fewer marketing emails, virtually no spam (no longer economical).
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- gl0wa 15y agoRequiring valid credit card may not by enough - it's still possible to walk around it by generating lots of virtual credit cards, even on the fly.
- denzil_correa 15y agoYeah! I will use it.
- harryf 15y agoThis could be a good thing. There's a niche for web search as a service plus paying customers might help steer Microsoft to better things with Bing
- guard-of-terra 15y agoThis is important because some leading local search engines (seznam, naver (?), baidu) use Bing for their global index.
- zaidf 15y agoThis got me thinking...is it possible for Microsoft to secretly buy out DDG and leave them the fuck alone except where they need help(ie. access to Bing index)? For all the money the Bing unit keeps pouring, I feel buying DDG and leaving them the heck alone can be a reasonable long-term bet with relatively little risk. The challenge would be to keep the founders/team motivated. They could spin it off as a completely different company on IPO track and give significant equity. But then what if Google wants to buy them out? And of course, the Bing team may have a problem with MSFT creating internal competition though that may just push em to do better. More likely if DuckDuckGo gets in an acquisition bidding war, I put my money on Gabe passing acquisition for raising a huge funding round that lets him take some money off the table. With all the flaws(enough that I don't use it), it remains a rare search engine start-up that has its heart in the right place: to actually serve consumers versus build some technology or team and get acquired(looking at you, Powerset).
- motti_s 15y agoHere is something ironic. I bet you many of DDG's users are hackers who use it for privacy reasons. The same hackers who rely on Google Analytics in their own websites. If DuckDuckGo grows to become more than a niche search engine, the same hackers who use it will have to reinvent Analytics somehow. This is reason #1 why DDG will stay small. Reason #2 is that if necessary, a DuckDuckGoogle can be created in an afternoon's worth of effort in Mountain View.
- zaidf 15y agoReason #2 is that if necessary, a DuckDuckGoogle can be created in an afternoon's worth of effort in Mountain View. I can't tell how serious you are with that statement.
- eurleif 15y agoI don't understand your line of reasoning. Yes, Google Analytics is useful, and we would have to replace it if Google the company went out of business or discontinued it, but why is that going to motivate people to use Google the search engine?
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- Aloisius 15y agoTime for people to start supporting something like Common Crawl http://commoncrawl.org/ http://commoncrawl.org/ to build their own search engines.
- CurtHagenlocher 15y agoBecause by contrast, that will be free?
- joedevon 15y agoIt is free. And will continue to be so. It's not-for-profit.
- fungi 15y agoim rooting for http://yacy.net/en/ http://yacy.net/en/ love the idea but search results are balls (ATM)
- greglindahl 15y agoblekko has been running a crawl+index of several billion pages for 2 years now, so perhaps I can talk about this a little. If you want access to a big crawl to grep through it for interesting data, then Common Crawl is awesome and inexpensive and I don't think you can get anything like it for the price, unless your query is simple enough to run as a blekko webgrep (https://blekko.com/webgrep https://blekko.com/webgrep). If you want to build a search engine, Common Crawl isn't so useful. Search engines want _directed_ crawling of the pages that they think are good. Crawling is only a small fraction of the total work done in a search engine. Search engines generally aren't on AWS, because the right configuration of machine isn't rented by Amazon -- serving queries needs SSDs or more ram and less cpu than what Amazon offers. So, what Common Crawl offers a search engine is higher costs and mostly bad data.
- Aloisius 14y agoI believe Common Crawl will do a directed crawl if you contact them.
- loverobots 15y agoWhy Microsoft? Do you really need that $2 per 1000 or whatever when you could gain adoption?
- caryme 15y agoIn my experience with the Bing API in the last several months, I've found that you get what you pay for. Its performance has been inconsistent at best, to the point which I created the site http://isthebingapiworking.heroku.com/ http://isthebingapiworking.heroku.com/. The web search api frequently orders of magnitude fewer results than the actual website, a problem making a frequent theme in their developer forums http://www.bing.com/community/developer/f/12254.aspx http://www.bing.com/community/developer/f/12254.aspx. By charging for their search API, I would just say that Microsoft is beginning to take their API seriously. It seems pretty clear that minimal resources, if any, were dedicated to the free version. I'm bummed, because I've found relative success using their news search api (particularly for the article aggregation component of http://www.congressionalprimaries.org/ http://www.congressionalprimaries.org/), and now we'll have to look into alternatives, but if this means actually providing a decent product, I think this is a good move for Microsoft.
- ww520 15y agoActually the search API would be interesting for domain specific search. You can use the API to create a site to present result specific to MP3, for example, formatting the result with the MP3 attributes.
- zmonkeyz 15y agoMaybe Megadeath can make a "Bing sells, but who's buying?" album.