bing-search

A Ruby client for the Bing Search API.

Getting Started

Installation

gem install bing-search

Sign up for the Bing Search API or the Web-Only Bing Search API at the Microsoft Azure Marketplace. Then retrieve your Account Key from the My Account section of the marketplace and provide it as shown below.

Documentation

This README provides an overview of bing-search. Full documentation is available at rubydoc.info.

Basics

To use bing-search, first supply your Account Key:

BingSearch.account_key = 'hzy9+Y6...'

Then, use BingSearch.web to search for web pages:

results = BingSearch.web('Dirac')

Or, use the other BingSearch class methods to search for images, news, video, related searches, and spelling suggestions:

BingSearch.spelling('Feinman').first.suggestion # => "Feynman"

The type of result depends on the kind of search:

BingSearch.web('Gell-Mann').class # => WebResult
BingSearch.image('Pauli').class # => ImageResult
BingSearch.video('von Neumann').class # => VideoResult

And each result type has its own attributes:

web = BingSearch.web('Gell-Mann').first
web.summary # => "Murray Gell-Mann (born September 15, 1929) is an American physicist ..."

image = BingSearch.image('Pauli').first
image.media_type # => "image/jpeg"

video = BingSearch.video('von Neumann').first
video.duration # => 151000

See the documentation of the result types for a full list of the attributes.

Options

The search methods take options that control the number of results returned;

BingSearch.web('Dyson', limit: 5).count # => 5

the size, orientation, and contents of images;

BingSearch.image 'Tesla', filters: [:large, :wide, :photo, :face]

whether to highlight query terms in the results;

BingSearch.news('Hawking', highlighting: true).first.title # => "How Intel Gave Stephen Hawking a Voice"

and many other aspects of the search. Note that "enumeration" options—those whose values are module-level constants—may be provided as underscored symbols:

# equivalent searches
BingSearch.news 'Higgs', category: BingSearch::NewsCategory::ScienceAndTechnology
BingSearch.news 'Higgs', category: :science_and_technology

See BingSearch::Client for exhaustive documentation of the options.

Composite Searches

To retrieve multiple result types at once, use BingSearch.composite:

result = BingSearch.composite('Majorana', [:web, :image, :news])

The result is a BingSearch::CompositeSearchResult ...

result.class # => BingSearch::CompositeResult

... containing an array for each result type:

result.web.first.class # => BingSearch::WebResult
result.image.first.class # => BingSearch::ImageResult
result.news.first.class # => BingSearch::NewsResult

All of the single-type search options are supported in composite searches, though the names may have prefixes to specify the type they pertain to:

BingSearch.composite 'Fermi', [:image, :video], image_filters: [:small], video_filters: [:short]

Composite searches also give you access to more data about the search including the total number of results in the Bing index and whether Bing corrected apparent errors in the query text:

result = BingSearch.composite('Feyman', [:web, :image, :news])
result.web_total # => 2400000
result.altered_query # => "feynman"

Web-Only API

To use the less expensive web-only API, set BingSearch.web_only:

BingSearch.web_only = true
BingSearch.news 'Newton' # => BingSearch::ServiceError
BingSearch.web 'Newton'

BingSearch::Client

BingSearch::Client is the class underlying the BingSearch class methods. You can use it on its own to run multiple searches over a single TCP connection:

BingSearch::Client.open do |client|
  client.web 'Lee'
  client.web 'Wu'
  client.web 'Yang' 
end

Or to override global settings:

client = BingSearch::Client.new(account_key: 'hzy9+Y6...', web_only: true)

Tests

To run the tests:

Sign up for both the standard and web-only APIs
Set the environment variable BING_SEARCH_ACCOUNT_KEY to your Account Key
rake

Contributing

Please submit issues and pull requests to jonahb/bing-search on GitHub.