Bing Entity Search API
Enterprise search software
AI search engine tools
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What is Bing Entity Search API
Bing Entity Search API is a cloud API that returns structured information about people, places, organizations, and other entities from Bing’s knowledge sources. It is used by developers and data teams to enrich applications with entity attributes, disambiguation, and related entities for search, content tagging, and knowledge graph-style experiences. The service is typically consumed via REST endpoints and integrates into custom pipelines rather than providing an end-user search UI. It is offered as part of Microsoft’s Bing Search APIs on Azure.
Structured entity enrichment
The API provides entity-centric results (e.g., identifiers, descriptions, images, and related entities) rather than only keyword search results. This supports use cases such as content classification, entity linking, and building knowledge panels in internal applications. It can reduce the need to maintain a proprietary entity database for common public entities.
Developer-friendly REST integration
The service is accessed through standard HTTP requests and returns machine-readable JSON responses. This makes it straightforward to embed into custom enterprise applications, data enrichment jobs, or search pipelines. Azure-based authentication and metering align with common enterprise cloud procurement and governance patterns.
Backed by Bing knowledge sources
Results leverage Bing’s indexing and knowledge graph-style aggregation, which can help with entity disambiguation (e.g., distinguishing people or organizations with similar names). This is useful when building AI-assisted search or analytics features that require canonical entity resolution. It can complement internal search systems by adding external context.
Not an enterprise search platform
Bing Entity Search API does not provide a full enterprise search stack such as document ingestion, connectors to internal repositories, relevance tuning, or a packaged search UI. Organizations typically need additional components to index internal content and manage permissions. It fits best as an enrichment service within a broader search architecture.
Coverage and freshness vary
Entity availability and detail depend on Bing’s underlying sources and may vary by entity type, geography, or language. Some entities may return limited attributes or ambiguous matches that require application-side validation. Teams should test coverage against their domain-specific entity sets before committing.
Cost and quota constraints
Usage is generally priced per transaction with quotas and rate limits that can affect high-volume enrichment workloads. Costs can become material when used for bulk processing or frequent re-enrichment. Implementations often need caching, batching, and monitoring to manage spend and throttling.
Plan & Pricing
Pricing model: Pay-as-you-go (transactions-based) Free tier/trial:
- Free tier: 1,000 transactions free per month (Free instance: 1 TPS).
- Azure free account: $200 credit for 30 days (account-level trial to try services). Example costs / notes from official Azure pricing page:
- Bing Entity Search (standalone): Standard (100 TPS) — public page shows price as "$- per 1,000 transactions" (price not published on the public page).
- Bing Search v7 S1 bundle (includes Entity Search): Autosuggest/Spell Check are billed at $7 per 25,000 transactions (this specific increment/price is published). Other per-1,000 transaction prices on the page are shown as "$-" (not published). Billing increments: Most endpoints billed per 1,000 transactions; in S1, Autosuggest and Spell Check are billed per 25,000 transactions. Purchase guidance / notes: Prices may vary by region/currency, some prices require signing in or contacting sales for a quote; Azure page directs customers to "Talk to a sales specialist" or "Request a pricing quote."
Seller details
Microsoft Corporation
Redmond, Washington, United States
1975
Public
https://www.microsoft.com/
https://x.com/Microsoft
https://www.linkedin.com/company/microsoft/
