The newly launched search engine Bing has a simple restful API. We have created a thin Python wrapper over this API, which allows to query the Bing servers in a very pythonic way.

Installing this is as easy as easy_install bingapi.

[Or get it here or here ]

Using

from bingapi import bingapi
bing = bingapi.Bing(<appid>)
bing.do_web_search('Usware Technologies')

The README from the project is posted below, which provides more details on using this.

bingapi.py is a very thin python wrapper over the Bing API. Bing provides a very simple Restful interface to their search engine and provides results in JSON and XML interface.

With bingapi.py, we query the rest urls to get the JSON response, which is parsed with simplejson.py. bingapi.py just adds simple niceties like logging and error handling.

Installing bingapi.py

easy_install bingapi

or Svn it from https://svn.uswaretech.com/bingapi/

Using bingapi.py

To use this library, you need to have an Appid from Bing. You can get it from http://www.bing.com/developers/createapp.aspx

The meat of bingapi.py is talk_to_bing function. It takes a query(eg. salsa) and a sources(eg. web) and other optional parameters in extra_args (eg. {‘web.offset’: 40}) and returns the dictionary of Bing’s response.

eg

In [2]: from bingapi import bingapi

In [3]: bing = bingapi.Bing('<Your Appid>')

In [4]: bing.talk_to_bing('salsa', sources='web')
Out[4]: 
..........

In [5]: bing.talk_to_bing('salsa', sources='web', extra_args={'web.offset':40})
Out[5]: 
..........

Class Bing also provides utility functions to do the various types of seraches so you dont have to remember the source type.

The various functions available are,

do_web_search
do_image_search
do_news_search
do_spell_search
do_related_search
do_phonebook_search
do_answers_search

All of them are used similarly.

In [6]: bing.do_web_search('salsa')
Out[6]: 
..........

In [7]: bing.do_image_search('salsa')
Out[7]: 
..............

In [8]: bing.do_answers_search('what is salsa')
Out[8]: 
...............

If you want to use multiple sources in one call you can use talk_to_bing directly as

In [10]: bing.talk_to_bing(query='salsa', sources='web news')
Out[10]:
............

But, but.. Why bing? you ask. Well, other than the fact that bing search is indeed better in some areas, particularly multimedia, bing has fairer usage quota and API restrictions.

Resources

• http://www.bing.com/developers/
• http://pypi.python.org/pypi/bingapi/0.01

Developing a search mashup? Bing API? Yahoo, Google APIs? We can help.

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