The Live Search to Bing rebranding covers the complex variety of nooks and crannies associated with Microsoft's search engine, including the application programming interface. On May 28, concomitantly with the start of the Bing worldwide roll-out, the software giant also officially unveiled the Beta for the new generation of search engine API. Still, even evolved the Bing API 2.0 continues to be an integral part of an initiative intimately connected with Live Search, namely Project Silk Road. Of course, that with the recent search engine and consumer brand swap, Silk Road will be focused exclusively on Bing moving forward.

“A key part of Project Silk Road is a re-architected Bing API that offers open, flexible options for building or enhancing your site or applications. Developing an application with the new API is straightforward: Choose a SourceType (or SourceTypes – you’re not limited to one), choose an output protocol (JSON, SOAP, or XML) and then customize according to your needs. All you need to get going is an AppID,” reads a message on the Silk Road official webpage.

In addition to the Bing API 2.0, Project Silk Road also offers Bing Maps APIs, formerly Virtual Earth APIs, adCenter Publisher, Webmaster Center, the Custom Web Error Toolkit, and the Excel Add-in for adCenter. In addition, the Redmond company also provides Instant Answers and Video Syndication services but only to a limited audience, with invitation-only access.

With the new Bing 2.0 API Microsoft now offers: “access through new interfaces: JSON, and XML over HTTP. Of course, you can still use our SOAP interface. The new API is strongly typed and offers access to seven different types of results. We've opened up our Terms of Use, eliminating the pre-set usage quota. We do require that you use this API for user-facing applications only. We've retained the popular capability to batch as many SourceTypes as you want into a single request with a single query string,” explained Alessandro Catorcini, lead program manager, Bing API.