Microsoft is making a big change with its Bing search engine, with the announcement that Bing Search APIs will shut down later this year and AI services being the sole replacement.
Developers who integrate search into their products (whether that be an app, the web, etc) can choose to leverage the Bing Search API to do this. Effectively ,it hands off the job of searching the web to an actual search engine.
Microsoft is now shutting down this service, with “any existing instances” being “completely” shut down on August 11 of this year.
Bing Search APIs will be retired on August 11, 2025. Any existing instances of Bing Search APIs will be decommissioned completely, and the product will no longer be available for usage or new customer signup.
This leaves developers needing to find a replacement, and Microsoft’s suggestion is to just use AI instead.
The company says that its customers “may want to consider” using Azure AI Agents, which can use Bing Search on the user’s behalf to generate responses. This likely won’t work in all cases, though, especially if the goal was to bring back links rather than text answers. It all depends on the developer’s use case, but it’s a big shift in functionality.
Wired reported on this change earlier this week, and confirmed with DuckDuckGo, one big name using Bing Search APIs, that nothing will be changing with its access. It’s more likely that smaller developers will be affected by the shutdown.
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