14 DAY TRIAL // Microsoft has discontinued Bing.com/siteowner, but this should not be a real surprise, especially since the Redmond company provided notice of its plans in February 2011.
Users visiting Bing.com/siteowner will be redirected to a HTTP 404 error, revealed Lester Jackson, Senior Program Manager, Bing.
At the same time, a general HTTP 404 error will also be displayed for the customers that get results by entering queries in the search box associated with site owner.
Back in February 2011, Microsoft explained that the decision to shut down Bing.com/siteowner was catalyzed by the low adoption rate.
In this regard, it appears that there won’t be many those missing this particular functionality of Microsoft’s search / decision engine, although the software giant claimed that there were some loyal customers which had embraced it.
The move was also supported by the fact that the functionality provided by Bing.com/siteowner was overlapping with the Bing search API, so the Redmond company moved to clean up redundancies.
Jackson made it clear that all those affected by the shutting down of Bing.com/siteowner have alternatives available to them:
“For developers, you will need to move to the Bing API 2.0 in order to continue to receive web or site search results. The Bing API 2.0 offers open, flexible options for building or enhancing your site or applications.
Developing an application with the Bing API 2.0 is straight forward and comes with thorough MSDN resources and an introductory primer.
For non-developers, there is also an RSS API that can be embedded into 3rd party widgets that integrate into websites or blogs. Integrating RSS feed widgets is as simple as copying & pasting a snippet of code to embed into your web page.
Many are free and provide a fun, interactive experience for your readers and keep them coming back to your site. To begin exploring this option, do a search on Bing for "RSS Widgets" and review the RSS API resources.”