How to Add Bing Search to Your Blog/Website

Third-party websites can benefit from Bing integration in order to deliver a superior user experience to visitors in terms of search. An indispensable feature to websites, search can be enhanced through the addition of Microsoft’s decision engine. In this regard, the Bing Box is the place to start for website owners that want to offer search services through Bing on their online properties. The best thing about the Bing Box, in addition to the fact that it is available for free, is the fact that it requires extremely little coding, and, thus, it is not limited in any way to web developers.

“Got Bing on your site yet? If not, there's an online tool that makes adding a Bing search box to your site nice and easy. Simply go to Bing Box for the 3-step process to add an advanced search box that you can customize, so users can search your site or search the Web from your site,” George Thomas Jr., Bing Developer Center, revealed.

There are two options available from Microsoft: Basic Search Box and Advanced Search Box. The first is designed to allow users to search either that specific site/blog or the web, while the latter can be customized in order for additional websites to be added. Either way, Microsoft has made it extremely simple for Bing to be added to third-party websites.

In order to add a basic Bing search box to a website, and let users search the Internet, the following snippet of code needs to be inserted in the site:

<form method="get" action="http://www.bing.com/search">
<input type="hidden" name="cp" value="CODE PAGE USED BY YOUR HTML PAGE" />
<input type="hidden" name="FORM" value="FREEWS" />
 <table bgcolor="#FFFFFF">
  <tr>
   <td>
    <a rel="nofollow" rel="nofollow" href="http://www.bing.com/">
    <img src="http://www.bing.com/siteowner/s/siteowner/Logo_51x19_Dark.png" border="0" ALT="bing" />
    </a>
   </td>
   <td>
    <input type="text" name="q" size="30" />
    <input type="submit" value="Search Web" />
   </td>
  </tr>
 </table>
</form>

“Replace 'CODE PAGE USED BY YOUR HTML PAGE' with the code page number of the language your website is written in. For example, if your website is written in a western European-based (also known as Latin 1) language, such as French, English, or German, replace this instruction with the number 1252: value="1252",” Thomas noted.

A basic Bing box can also be used to let users search the content of a specific website. Here is the code that needs to be inserted into the website’s pages:

<form method="get" action="http://www.bing.com/search">
<input type="hidden" name="cp" value="CODE PAGE USED BY YOUR HTML PAGE" />
<input type="hidden" name="FORM" value="FREESS" />
 <table bgcolor="#FFFFFF">
  <tr>
   <td>
    <a rel="nofollow" rel="nofollow" href="http://www.bing.com/">
    <img src="http://www.bing.com/siteowner/s/siteowner/Logo_51x19_Dark.png" border="0" ALT="bing" />
    </a>
   </td>
   <td>
    <input type="text" name="q" size="30" />
    <input type="submit" value="Search Site" />
    <input type="hidden" name="q1" value="site:YOUR DOMAIN NAME GOES HERE" />
   </td>
  </tr>
 </table>
</form>