Microsoft is closing access to Bing search results to third-party developers. The company quietly announced the change earlier this week, noting that the Bing Search APIs would be deprecated on August 11. Additionally, all existing instances will be completely decommissioned, and the product will no longer be available for use or new customer sign-ups.
Microsoft is closing access to Bing search results to third-party developers. The company quietly announced the change earlier this week, noting that the Bing Search APIs would be deprecated on August 11. Additionally, all existing instances will be completely decommissioned, and the product will no longer be available for use or new customer sign-ups.
This sudden removal of the Bing Search API will impact third-party app developers and competing search engines that use Microsoft search results for their services. Microsoft is currently recommending that developers use “grounding with Bing Search within Azure AI Agents” as a replacement, which allows chatbots to interact with web data from Bing, The Verge reports .
Some large Bing API customers will reportedly retain access to the service after the shutdown on August 11. Among them is DuckDuckGo, which uses Bing to power its search engine. However, other smaller developers will not be so lucky.
Microsoft's decision to cut off access to Bing's search APIs comes after the company raised prices for data access in recent years, just a week before Microsoft's big Build developer conference, and days after the U.S. Department of Justice filed a lawsuit seeking to break up Google's advertising empire.
