What is a search engine without a collection of tools tailored to the needs of webmasters and web developers? With the Bing Toolbox Microsoft is looking to provide website owners with the resources necessary to adapt their websites and online applications to Bing. The Redmond company announced the Bing Toolbox at the end of the past week, indicating that the website brought to the table a set of tools built especially for the Bing community. The promise from the software giant is that Bing Toolbox will serve as the key to boost user engagement and traffic to websites and web-based apps via the successor of Live Search.

“We're really excited to announce the arrival of the Bing Toolbox, a new portal for all you Bing webmasters, publishers, developers, and advertisers out there. The Toolbox is an organized set of tools for the entire Bing community, plus links to our Webmaster and Developer community blogs and forums. The Toolbox provides everything you need to work with Bing in one place—as well as the site you’ll want to regularly visit for announcements of cool new features the moment they're ready,” revealed Rick DeJarnette, Bing Webmaster Center.

Bing Toolbox enables website owners to easily submit their URLs to be indexed by the search engine. At the same time, the portal enables the submission of sitemap files and access to the Bing webmaster tools. For developers looking to use Bing as a platform, the Toolbox allows them to get an AppID, the first step on leveraging the Bing application programming interface (API).

“Developer tools now available in the Bing Toolbox include those for API access, PowerToys, Maps, and Translator. This is a first effort and we’ll be building out the site with new content and updated tools as they become available,” a member of the Bing team added.