At the Build 2013 developer conference, Microsoft announced plans to open up its Bing search engine for application development. The company has launched several new APIs and services, including the Bing Entity API, Bing Optical Character Recognition Control, Bing Translator Control, Bing Speech Control and Bing Maps 2D/3D Control. “Today we’re announcing a profound expansion of our approach to search by creating a platform that unites the intelligent services that power Bing.com and by making these capabilities available to third-party developers via new APIs and controls,” blogged Microsoft’s Gurdeep Singh Pall.
In addition, Microsoft has opened up a new Bing Developer Center to provide access to all the new tools. The company says Bing is changing from a search engine into a true application development platform.
Pall added, “For us, the future of search is not about more search boxes–it’s about building a platform to enable applications and devices to empower people with knowledge and help them do more-not just search more.”
