Here at the Web Shop, we like to take advantage of existing tools, whether they’re free or reasonably priced. One tool that we opted to not roll on our own is a site search. From time to time clients require them and the first third party search tool so used was Google Custom Search. It’s pretty expensive considering how much traffic site searches tend to get and it behaves oddly, especially with sites that aren’t well indexed.
When Yahoo Boss came out with the appealing price of free, we made the switch to that. On top of being free it was painless to integrate with, you can’t beat that. At some point Yahoo decided to begin charging for Boss. Their new pricing was reasonable for our needs and their service was decent enough that when it became a paid service we stuck with them. Now it’s come to my attention we have yet another option.
I was searching php.net today and I noticed they have search results powered by Microsoft’s Bing, and more specifically, I assume, the search API. At first glance it looked like a free search API ignoring the requirement of the Bing attribution. This is unlikely a deal breaker for most of our clients.
Microsoft has even been so kind as to provide a terrible PHP code sample. If this pans out you may be seeing a Bing a logo on some Webshop sites before long.
Tags: bing, Google Custom Search, yahoo
