Search for news with the Bing News Search API

Warning

On October 30, 2020, the Bing Search APIs moved from Azure AI services to Bing Search Services. This documentation is provided for reference only. For updated documentation, see the Bing search API documentation. For instructions on creating new Azure resources for Bing search, see Create a Bing Search resource through the Azure Marketplace.

The Bing Image Search API makes it easy to integrate Bing's cognitive news searching capabilities into your applications.

While the Bing News Search API primarily finds and returns relevant news articles, it provides several features for intelligent, and focused news retrieval on the web.

Suggest and use search terms

If you provide a search box where the user enters their search term, use the Bing Autosuggest API to improve the experience. The API returns suggested query strings based on partial search terms as the user types.

After the user enters their search term, URL encode it before setting the q query parameter. For example, if the user enters sailing dinghies, set q to sailing+dinghies or sailing%20dinghies.

Get general news

To get general news articles related to the user's search term from the web, send the following GET request:

GET https://api.cognitive.microsoft.com/bing/v7.0/news/search?q=sailing+dinghies&mkt=en-us HTTP/1.1
Ocp-Apim-Subscription-Key: 123456789ABCDE
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; MSIE 10.0; Windows Phone 8.0; Trident/6.0; IEMobile/10.0; ARM; Touch; NOKIA; Lumia 822)
X-Search-ClientIP: 999.999.999.999
X-Search-Location: lat:47.60357;long:-122.3295;re:100
X-MSEdge-ClientID: <blobFromPriorResponseGoesHere>
Host: api.cognitive.microsoft.com

If it's your first time calling any of the Bing APIs, don't include the client ID header. Only include the client ID if you've previously called a Bing API and Bing returned a client ID for the user and device combination.

To get news from a specific domain, use the site: query operator.

GET https://api.cognitive.microsoft.com/bing/v7.0/news/search?q=sailing+dinghies+site:contososailing.com&mkt=en-us HTTP/1.1

The following JSON sample shows the response to the previous query. As part of the Use and display requirements for the Bing search APIs, you must display each news article in the order provided in the response. If the article has clustered articles, you should indicate that related articles exist and display them upon request.

{
    "_type" : "News",
    "readLink" : "https:\/\/api.cognitive.microsoft.com\/bing\/v5\/news\/search?q=sailing+dinghies",
    "totalEstimatedMatches" : 88400,
    "value" : [{
        "name" : "Sailing Vies for Four Trophies",
        "url" : "http:\/\/www.bing.com\/cr?IG=CCE2F06CA750455891FE99A72...",
        "image" : {
            "thumbnail" : {
                "contentUrl" : "https:\/\/www.bing.com\/th?id=ON.9C23AA5...",
                "width" : 650,
                "height" : 341
            }
        },
        "description" : "College Rankings, presented by Zim...",
        "provider" : [{
            "_type" : "Organization",
            "name" : "contoso.com"
        }],
        "datePublished" : "2017-04-14T15:28:00"
    },

    ...

    {
        "name" : "Fabrikam Sailing Club to host Mirror Dinghy...",
        "url" : "http:\/\/www.bing.com\/cr?IG=CCE2F06CA750455891F...",
        "image" : {
            "thumbnail" : {
                "contentUrl" : "https:\/\/www.bing.com\/th?id=ON.36...",
                "width" : 448,
                "height" : 300
            }
        },
        "description" : "The sailing club that trained Olympian Ben...",
        "provider" : [{
            "_type" : "Organization",
            "name" : "Contoso"
        }],
        "datePublished" : "2017-04-04T11:02:00",
        "category" : "Sports"
    }]
}

The news answer lists the news articles that Bing thought were relevant to the query. The totalEstimatedMatches field contains an estimate of the number of articles available to view. For information about paging through the articles, see Paging News.

Each news article in the list includes the article's name, description, and URL to the article on the host's website. If the article contains an image, the object includes a thumbnail of the image. Use name and url to create a hyperlink that takes the user to the news article on the host's site. If the article includes an image, also make the image clickable using url. Be sure to use provider to attribute the article.

If Bing can determine the category of news article, the article includes the category field.

Get today's top news

To get today's top news articles, you can send the same general news request as before, while leaving the q parameter unset.

GET https://api.cognitive.microsoft.com/bing/v7.0/news/search?q=&mkt=en-us HTTP/1.1
Ocp-Apim-Subscription-Key: 123456789ABCDE
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; MSIE 10.0; Windows Phone 8.0; Trident/6.0; IEMobile/10.0; ARM; Touch; NOKIA; Lumia 822)
X-Search-ClientIP: 999.999.999.999
X-Search-Location: lat:47.60357;long:-122.3295;re:100
X-MSEdge-ClientID: <blobFromPriorResponseGoesHere>
Host: api.cognitive.microsoft.com

The response for getting top news is almost the same as the one for getting general news. However, the news answer doesn't include the totalEstimatedMatches field because there's a set number of results. The number of top news articles may vary depending on the news cycle. Be sure to use the provider field to attribute the article.

Get news by category

To get news articles by category, such as the top sports or entertainment articles, send the following GET request to Bing:

GET https://api.cognitive.microsoft.com/bing/v7.0/news?category=sports&mkt=en-us HTTP/1.1
Ocp-Apim-Subscription-Key: 123456789ABCDE
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; MSIE 10.0; Windows Phone 8.0; Trident/6.0; IEMobile/10.0; ARM; Touch; NOKIA; Lumia 822)
X-Search-ClientIP: 999.999.999.999
X-Search-Location: lat:47.60357;long:-122.3295;re:100
X-MSEdge-ClientID: <blobFromPriorResponseGoesHere>
Host: api.cognitive.microsoft.com

Use the category query parameter to specify the category of articles to get. For a list of possible news categories that you may specify, see News Categories by Market.

The response for getting news by category is almost the same as getting general news. However, the articles are all from the specified category.

Get headline news

To request headline news articles and get articles from all news categories, send the following GET request to Bing:

GET https://api.cognitive.microsoft.com/bing/v7.0/news?mkt=en-us HTTP/1.1
Ocp-Apim-Subscription-Key: 123456789ABCDE
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; MSIE 10.0; Windows Phone 8.0; Trident/6.0; IEMobile/10.0; ARM; Touch; NOKIA; Lumia 822)
X-MSEdge-ClientIP: 999.999.999.999
X-Search-Location: lat:47.60357;long:-122.3295;re:100
X-MSEdge-ClientID: <blobFromPriorResponseGoesHere>
Host: api.cognitive.microsoft.com

Do not include the category query parameter.

The response for getting headline news is the same as getting today's top news. If the article is a headline article, its headline field is set to true.

By default, the response includes up to 12 headline articles. To change the number of headline articles to return, specify the headlineCount query parameter. The response also includes up to four non-headline articles per news category.

The response counts clusters as one article. Because a cluster may have several articles, the response may include more than 12 headline articles and more than four non-headline articles per category.

To get news topics that are trending on social networks, send the following GET request to Bing:

GET https://api.cognitive.microsoft.com/bing/v7.0/news/trendingtopics?mkt=en-us HTTP/1.1
Ocp-Apim-Subscription-Key: 123456789ABCDE
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; MSIE 10.0; Windows Phone 8.0; Trident/6.0; IEMobile/10.0; ARM; Touch; NOKIA; Lumia 822)
X-Search-ClientIP: 999.999.999.999
X-Search-Location: lat:47.60357;long:-122.3295;re:100
X-MSEdge-ClientID: <blobFromPriorResponseGoesHere>
X-MSAPI-UserState: <blobFromPriorResponseGoesHere>
Host: api.cognitive.microsoft.com

Note

Trending Topics is available only in the en-US and zh-CN markets.

The following JSON is the response to the preceding request. Each trending news article includes a related image, breaking news flag, and a URL to the Bing search results for the article. Use the URL in the webSearchUrl field to take the user to the Bing search results page. Or, use the query text to call the Web Search API to display the results yourself.

{
    "_type" : "TrendingTopics",
    "value" : [{
        "name" : "Canada pot measure",
        "image" : {
            "url" : "https:\/\/www.bing.com\/th?id=OPN.RTNews_hHD...",
            "provider" : [{
                "_type" : "Organization",
                "name" : "Contoso Images"
            }]
        },
        "webSearchUrl" : "https:\/\/www.bing.com\/cr?IG=070292D8CEDD...",
        "isBreakingNews" : false,
        "query" : {
            "text" : "Canada marijuana"
        }
    },
    {
        "name" : "Down on Vegas move",
        "image" : {
            "url" : "https:\/\/www.bing.com\/th?id=OPN.RTNews_Bfbmg8h...",
            "provider" : [{
                "_type" : "Organization",
                "name" : "Contoso"
            }]
        },
        "webSearchUrl" : "https:\/\/www.bing.com\/cr?IG=070292D8CEDD...",
        "isBreakingNews" : false,
        "query" : {
            "text" : "Marcus Appel Las Vegas"
        }
    },

    ...

    ]
}

If there are other articles that are related to a news article, the news article may include the clusteredArticles field. The following shows an article with clustered articles.

    {
        "name" : "Playoffs 2017: Betting lines, point spreads...",
        "url" : "http:\/\/www.bing.com\/cr?IG=4B7056CEC271408997D115...",
        "image" : {
            "thumbnail" : {
                "contentUrl" : "https:\/\/www.bing.com\/th?id=ON.D7B1...",
                "width" : 700,
                "height" : 393
            }
        },
        "description" : "April 14, 2017 3:37pm EDT April 14, 2017 3:34pm...",
        "provider" : [{
            "_type" : "Organization",
            "name" : "Contoso"
        }],
        "datePublished" : "2017-04-14T19:43:00",
        "category" : "Sports",
        "clusteredArticles" : [{
            "name" : "Playoffs 2017: Betting odds, favorites to win...",
            "url" : "http:\/\/www.bing.com\/cr?IG=4B7056CEC271408997D1159E...",
            "description" : "April 14, 2017 3:30pm EDT April 14, 2017 3:27pm...",
            "provider" : [{
                "_type" : "Organization",
                "name" : "Contoso"
            }],
            "datePublished" : "2017-04-14T19:37:00",
            "category" : "Sports"
        }]
    },

Throttling requests

The service and your subscription type determine the number of queries per second (QPS) that you can make. Make sure your application includes the logic to stay within your quota. If the QPS limit is met or exceeded, the request fails and an HTTP 429 status code is returned. The response includes the Retry-After header, which indicates how long you must wait before sending another request.

Denial-of-service versus throttling

The service makes a differentiation between a denial-of-service (DoS) attack and a QPS violation. If the service suspects a DoS attack, the request succeeds (HTTP status code is 200 OK). However, the body of the response is empty.

Next steps