Anyone using Bing API to retrieve search results?

[ChinaMobi]

I'm puzzled by the significant difference in reporting search results between manual approach and using Bing API.

For example, entering books+on+frugal+living in Bing gives 589 search results. However, using the following Bing API gives a whopping 2,930,000 search results instead.

h t t p://api.bing.net/xml.aspx?AppId=myAppID&sources=web&query=books+on+frugal+living

Can someone tell me where I've gone wrong?

Here's the returned XML file.



<SearchResponse Version="2.2">
<Query>
<SearchTerms>books on frugal living</SearchTerms>
</Query>
<web: Web>
<web: Total>2930000</web: Total>

[noonoo1]

I use the bing api on my site http://just.mobi

[ChinaMobi]

Did you have the issue I mentioned above, noonoo1? A few minutes ago I was reading a long thread on Google search API. They have the same issue and the bug has not been resolved since first discussed 2 years ago. Many are very frustrated but, hey, Google has no incentive to provide quality APIs which only add load to their server. So, I'm thinking MS is giving us the same issue.

Looks like you site may be making use of the MobileWeb SourceType. That's good use of Bing. How can you monetize the traffic? Have you tried any AdSense type ad program from MS to monetize your websites?

[gogo]

For example, entering books+on+frugal+living in Bing gives 589 search results. However, using the following Bing API gives a whopping 2,930,000 search results instead.
.

books+on+frugal+living gets me 166 results in bing.com

books on frugal living gets me 2,390,000 results on bing.com

are you sure the spaces between words are being formatted in your queries in the way bing wants them to be?

Have you looked at yahoo Boss?

[ChinaMobi]

I use + to connect words, as described in http://websearch.about.com/library/blbingsearch.htm. Since then I have experimented few more combinations. It looks like the difference is not large for one- or two-word search. The difference may become large for multiple-word search.

[gogo]

I use + to connect words, as described in http://websearch.about.com/library/blbingsearch.htm. Since then I have experimented few more combinations. It looks like the difference is not large for one- or two-word search. The difference may become large for multiple-word search.

Yes but that is not the Bing API you are quoting, it is advice to endusers on how to do successful searches. + is often used to replace spaces in URLs as well as being used to specify that a term must be included in search results, hence the possible issue. Presumably Bing is using ASP but certainly, for example, in PHP there are functions to urlencode and urldecode strings, I have found with Yahoo APIs this can make a big - and unpredictable - difference with queries.

[ChinaMobi]

I tried and instead of:

books+on+frugal+living

I put "books on frugal living" in the API

h t t p://api.bing.net/xml.aspx?AppId=myAppID&sources=web&query="books on frugal living"

and got even more (4,150,000)