
Microsoft Releases Bing API - With No Usage Quotas - raju
http://blog.programmableweb.com/2009/06/08/microsoft-releases-bing-api-with-no-usage-quotas/
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joel_feather
What the big companies are realising is this: When you get lots of small
developers using your API, you have tens of thousands of people who are
actively marketing your product through your API.

You don't need to build up any large marketing force anymore, just let the
developers do for you. For example, facebook connect drives people to
facebook, etc. The web is becoming an OS, and the big companies are trying to
achieve developer lock-in by offering a lot of convenience APIs and platforms.

He who gets the developers will get the users.

~~~
icey
It was fun to laugh at at the time, but Steve Ballmer has known this for
awhile. Remember his big, sweaty "Developers! Developers! Developers!
Developers!" rant?

~~~
jgrahamc
Never forget that Microsoft is at heart a languages company. They came from
writing computer languages and detoured into operating systems. Frankly,
they've always been very, very good to developers.

They've always known that the developers matter.

~~~
dougp
I still wish MS would ship windows with a usable console.

~~~
halo
Windows 7 ships with PowerShell.

~~~
jsonscripter
Windows 7 hasn't officially shipped yet.

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joel_feather
I've been using Windows 7 for a month now as my primary OS. Works fine.

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jaddison
The "API Basics" PDF doc states that you must a) have an API ID and b) limit
your Queries Per Second (QPS) to 7/second.

'b)' sounds like a usage quota to me.

~~~
solutionyogi
I don't think b) sounds like usage quota.

If you have an unlimited ride Metro Card, you can use it as many times as you
want during the month but you won't be able to swipe it back to back to
prevent abuse.

Similarly, 7 queries per second is a decent limit as it allows you to send
more than half a million queries (Exact number = 604800 queries) in a day.

~~~
oyving
Total number of queries for a day doesn't really matter much if your peak
traffic is above a per-second usage quota. That being said, I think the quota
is pretty generous.

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thorax
Cool, but a pain for most (existing) commercial usage:

“On any page in which you display Bing results, you will only display
advertising that we serve or provide.”

Not sure how most sites could do that-- you could even read this jerkily as
saying you'd be restricted from even advertising your own products on a page
with Bing results.

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sonink
Microsoft seems to be on the roll (or should I say 'on the bing')

With the smooth loading bing and now the open API, Microsoft seems to be
taking the battle straight to Yahoo and Google's court. This time Microsoft
does seem to 'get' the future of search, and with Bartz screwing up the Yahoo
open API program (with usage quotas and all) and Google just plan scared of
releasing its own, the folks at Redmond seem poised for the next big leap in
search.

I am not really a Microsoft fan, and use tons of great Google products, but
search needs to move ahead, much faster than what Google is taking it.

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davidw
Nice to see. Google got rid of their non-Javascript API, IIRC, so Yahoo was
the only one with a decent API.

~~~
litewulf
Google has a JSON-based API:
<http://code.google.com/apis/ajaxsearch/documentation/#fonje>

Its misleadingly named, hard to find, etc etc, but it exists. :/

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trezor
Site currently seems bombed and google cache comes up empty. Anyone have a
mirror?

Edit: Seems to work for me too now. For anyone interested, there's a bing
developer site which has more extensive information.

<http://www.bing.com/developers/>

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trickjarrett
Came up fine for me.

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ajross
I'm as much a fan of free, hackable APIs as anyone. But... how is this not a
really clear anti-trust violation? It's one thing for MS to release a product
that competes directly against Google's _free_ offerings. Quite another to use
its revenue from other sources to undercut Google's _pay_ services. MS isn't
competing on price here at all.

Maybe, I suppose, the argument would be that a target Google's size is so
large that MS has no effective monopoly power to leverage. Google could just
as easily (and, in many areas, is) fund free alternatives to MS software too.
But still, this seems like a borderline-scary regression to some pretty ugly
MS behavior.

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zaidf
Proving that someone is committing anti-trust violation against Google's
search business is a very uphill task.

That the party you accuse is Microsoft makes only a little difference.

~~~
ajross
I would reply with something interesting, but clearly I've angered the
downvote police, so I officially declare myself intimidated into submission.

~~~
zackattack
Don't be fooled: I accidentally upvoted him because his retort felt sensible,
but then I read his post, which rang of blatant trolling.

