Why I switched my search API from BOSS to Bing

I'm a massive fan of Yahoo's developer tools, I think they're massively underrated by geekdom, and I'm still heavily reliant on their geo-coding services like Placemaker. It makes me pretty sad to admit I've recently switched from Yahoo BOSS to Bing's search API, so I thought I'd share my reasons, together with some PHP sample code.

In a nutshell, BOSS wasn't finding enough results for the sort of work I'm doing. Here's an example search, looking for people called Susan Fogg with public Facebook profiles:

http://www.bing.com/search?q=site%3Awww.facebook.com%2Fpeople+intitle%3A%22Susan+Fogg%22
6 results

http://search.yahoo.com/search?p=site%3Awww.facebook.com%2Fpeople+intitle%3A%22Susan+Fogg%22
1 result

http://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Awww.facebook.com%2Fpeople+intitle%3A%22Susan+Fogg%22&filter=0
15 results

This is not a scientific survey by any means, but Bing seems to index a lot more of the obscure pages on social networks than Yahoo. If only Google offered an API, they would be even better, but switching to Bing still offers a big improvement for my application.

I was nervous that Bing would be crippled by usage terms, but luckily they are effectively unrestricted and can be used for non-user-facing applications like mine.

Here's the code I'm using, as a download or included inline below:

<?php

// You'll ned to get your own API keys for these services. See
// http://developer.yahoo.com/wsregapp/
// http://www.bing.com/developers/createapp.aspx
define('BING_API_KEY', '');
define('YAHOO_API_KEY', '');

function pete_curl_get($url, $params)
{
    $post_params = array();
    foreach ($params as $key => &$val) {
      if (is_array($val)) $val = implode(',', $val);
        $post_params[] = $key.'='.urlencode($val);
    }
    $post_string = implode('&', $post_params);

    $fullurl = $url."?".$post_string;

    $ch = curl_init();
    curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_SSL_VERIFYPEER, FALSE);
    curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_SSL_VERIFYHOST, FALSE);
    curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, $fullurl);
    curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, true);
    curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_USERAGENT, 'Mailana (curl)');
    $result = curl_exec($ch);
    curl_close($ch);

    return $result;
}

function perform_boss_web_search($terms)
{
    $searchurl = 'http://boss.yahooapis.com/ysearch/web/v1/';
    $searchurl .= urlencode(implode(' ', $terms));
    $searchparams = array(
        'appid' => YAHOO_API_KEY,
        'format' => 'json',
        'count' => '50',
    );

    $response = pete_curl_get($searchurl, $searchparams);
   
    $responseobject = json_decode($response, true);
   
    if ($responseobject['ysearchresponse']['totalhits']==0)
        return array();
   
    $allresponseresults = $responseobject['ysearchresponse']['resultset_web'];

    $result = array();
    foreach ($allresponseresults as $responseresult)
    {
        $result[] = array(
            'url' => $responseresult['url'],
            'title' => $responseresult['title'],
            'abstract' => $responseresult['abstract'],
        );
    }

    return $result;
}

function perform_bing_web_search($terms)
{
    $searchurl = 'http://api.bing.net/json.aspx?';
    $searchurl .= 'AppId='.BING_API_KEY;
    $searchurl .= '&Query='.urlencode(implode(' ', $terms));
    $searchurl .= '&Sources=Web';
    $searchurl .= '&Web.Count=50';
    $searchurl .= '&Web.Offset=0';
    $searchurl .= '&Web.Options=DisableHostCollapsing+DisableQueryAlterations';
    $searchurl .= '&JsonType=raw';

    $response = pete_curl_get($searchurl, array());
   
    $responseobject = json_decode($response, true);
    if ($responseobject['SearchResponse']['Web']['Total']==0)
        return array();
   
    $allresponseresults = $responseobject['SearchResponse']['Web']['Results'];

    $result = array();
    foreach ($allresponseresults as $responseresult)
    {
        $result[] = array(
            'url' => $responseresult['Url'],
            'title' => $responseresult['Title'],
            'abstract' => $responseresult['Description'],
        );
    }

    return $result;
}

if (isset($_REQUEST['q'])) {
    $terms = explode(' ', urldecode($_REQUEST['q']));
} else {
    $terms = array();
}

$termstring = implode(' ', $terms);
?>
<html>
<head>
<title>Test page for BOSS and Bing search apis</title>
</head>
<body>
<div style="padding:20px;">
<center>
<form method="GET" action="index.php">
Search terms: <input type="text" size="40" name="q" value="<?=$termstring?>"/>
</form>
</center>
</div>
<?php
if (count($terms)>0) {

    $bingresults = perform_bing_web_search($terms);
    $bossresults = perform_boss_web_search($terms);

    print '<br/><br/><h2>Bing search results ('.count($bingresults).')</h2><br/>';
    foreach ($bingresults as $result) {
        print '<a href="'.$result['url'].'">'.$result['title'].'</a><br/>';
        print '<span style="font-size:80%">'.$result['abstract'].'</span><br/><hr/>';
    }

    print '<br/><br/><h2>BOSS search results ('.count($bingresults).')</h2><br/>';
    foreach ($bingresults as $result) {
        print '<a href="'.$result['url'].'">'.$result['title'].'</a><br/>';
        print '<span style="font-size:80%">'.$result['abstract'].'</span><br/><hr/>';
    }

}

?>