Quickstart: Call your Bing Custom Search endpoint using Python

Article
05/08/2020

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.

Use this quickstart to learn how to request search results from your Bing Custom Search instance. Although this application is written in Python, the Bing Custom Search API is a RESTful web service compatible with most programming languages. The source code for this sample is available on GitHub.

Prerequisites

A Bing Custom Search instance. For more information, see Quickstart: Create your first Bing Custom Search instance.
Python 2.x or 3.x.

Create an Azure resource

Start using the Bing Custom Search API by creating one of the following Azure resources.

Bing Custom Search resource

Available through the Azure portal until you delete the resource.
Use the free pricing tier to try the service, and upgrade later to a paid tier for production.

Multi-Service resource

Available through the Azure portal until you delete the resource.
Use the same key and endpoint for your applications, across multiple Azure AI services.

Create and initialize the application

Create a new Python file in your favorite IDE or editor, and add the following import statements. Create variables for your subscription key, custom configuration ID, and search term.
```
import json
import requests

subscriptionKey = "YOUR-SUBSCRIPTION-KEY"
customConfigId = "YOUR-CUSTOM-CONFIG-ID"
searchTerm = "microsoft"
```

Send and receive a search request

Construct the request URL by appending your search term to the q= query parameter, and your search instance's custom configuration ID to the customconfig= parameter. Separate the parameters with an ampersand (&). You can use the global endpoint in the following code, or use the custom subdomain endpoint displayed in the Azure portal for your resource.
```
url = 'https://api.cognitive.microsoft.com/bingcustomsearch/v7.0/search?' + 'q=' + searchTerm + '&' + 'customconfig=' + customConfigId
```

Send the request to your Bing Custom Search instance, and print the returned search results.

r = requests.get(url, headers={'Ocp-Apim-Subscription-Key': subscriptionKey})
print(r.text)

Next steps

Build a Custom Search web app