Appendix: Terms of Use Overview

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The Bing API Terms of Use is a contract between you, as an application developer using the API, and Microsoft. You must review and agree to the contract prior to obtaining an Application ID and beginning use of the API. This appendix provides an overview of the contract’s requirements and prohibitions – that is, in a nutshell, what, as an application developer using the API, you must do and what you cannot do (besides the obvious "you are not going to use the API to plan a terrorist attack or run a drug smuggling ring" that our lawyers love so much).

What you must do

  • Display all the results you request.

  • Display your results in the context of a user-facing application or website.

  • Display attribution to Bing in a manner compliant with our branding rules. Currently, you may determine the specific manner in which you display attribution. A link to http://www.live.com with the query echo is a suggested example.

  • Restrict your usage to less than 7 queries per second (QPS) per IP address. You may be permitted to exceed this limit under some conditions, but this must be approved through discussion with api_tou@microsoft.com.

  • If you interleave data from any source other than the API with data from the API, clearly differentiate the respective sources.

What you cannot do

  • Use API results for search engine optimization (SEO). In particular, using the API for rank checks is explicitly prohibited.

  • Display advertisements in positions other than the mainline and sidebar.

  • Change the order of the results the API returns from a SourceType other than the Web SourceType.