14 DAY TRIAL // Website owners, administrators, etc. that are currently leveraging Bing Box need to start looking to alternative solutions as Microsoft announced that it will be shutting down Bing.com/siteowner. Bing Box still has some 60 days left to live, after which it will become nothing short of useless to sites worldwide that currently have the Bing search experience integrated.
Bing Box allows site owners to put a search box powered by Bing on their projects and allow visitors to get results from either a specific website or from the entire web.
The biggest advantage to the Bing Box was the fact that it required no coding to integrate into a site. With it gone, Microsoft recommends that the Bing application programming interface be used instead.
“As of April 4th, 2011 we will discontinue support for the bing.com/siteowner functionality. If you continue to leverage the feature after this date (April 4th, 2011), users who attempt to query in the search box will be redirected to a 404 page.
“This means that you will need to move to the Bing API in order to continue to receive web or site search results from us,” a member of the Bing team stated.
The Redmond company revealed that two reasons fueled its decision to discontinue Bing Box.
“First, the tool has not been getting a lot of use and while we have some very loyal customers on it, we believe we can provide you better alternatives in the future as we free up resources.
“Second, the functionality available through bing.com/siteowner can be replicated with the Bing search API and so it feels a bit redundant,” Microsoft stated.
The announcement made by the Redmond company at the end of the past week acts as advance notification, helping customers migrate away from the Bing Box by April 4.