Version 1.1b of the Live Search API includes several major updates:
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The addition of a Video SourceType, which enables the return of full-size and thumbnail images, along with thumbnail information such as file size, height, and width.
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Additional support for the InlineAnswers SourceType.
These new features are described below; quick links to the new content are included for convenient reference.
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Access to Video and Inline Answers is reserved for users having an explicit contract with Microsoft. For more information, please contact api_tou@microsoft.com. |
Video SourceType
The VideoSourceType enables you to return information about videos that are returned by the query. Properties of the Video Class (Search) include the URI to the full-size image, the URI to the generated thumbnail, the height and width of the full-size image, the height and width of the thumbnail, the file size of the full-size image, and the file size of the thumbnail.
For more information on the Video Class and the properties it supports, see the Video Class (Search) topic.
New Source Types
Enhancements in Version 1.1
Image SourceType
The ImageSourceType enables you to return information about images that are returned by the query. Properties of the Image Class (Search) include the URI to the full-size image, the URI to the generated thumbnail, the height and width of the full-size image, the height and width of the thumbnail, the file size of the full-size image, and the file size of the thumbnail.
For more information on the Image Class and the properties it supports, see the Image Class (Search) topic.
FileType Support for the PhoneBook SourceType
The SourceRequest.FileType Property (Search) now enables you to restrict the type of files returned from the PhoneBookSourceType and the WebSourceType.
Documentation for the WebSourceType values that are supported by the FileType property has been enhanced to include information for filtering by filename extension for the following formats: Microsoft Word documents with the .doc file extension; Autodesk Drawing files with the .dwf file extension; Hypertext Markup Language files with the .htm and .html file extensions; Adobe Acrobat Portable Document Format files with the .pdf file extension; Microsoft PowerPoint presentations with the .ppt file extension; Adobe PostScript documents with the .ps file extension; Microsoft Rich Text Format documents with the .rtf and .doc file extensions; Generic Text files with the .text and .txt file extensions; and Microsoft Excel workbooks with the .xls file extension.
The PhoneBookSourceType now supports the filtering of results by listing type, including the restriction of results to commercial (Yellow Pages) listings using the YPFileType value, and to residential (White Pages) listings using the WPFileType value. Filtering by listing type is available for the en-US and es-US markets only.
Enhancements in Version 1.0
Version 1.0 of the Live Search API included a number of significant updates from the previous version (version 0.60, Beta). These updates included new SourceType values, new ResultField values, new SearchFlags, a new SortBy class for PhoneBook results, support for additional markets, an increase in the depth of results, filtering for SearchTags, and a FileType property that enables developers to return pages containing files of a specified type. These features are described below and include quick links to the new content for convenient reference.
New Source Types
The InlineAnswers SourceType has been enhanced to include new result types: WeatherIA and ShowTimesIA.WeatherIA responds to queries of the form "weather" (as the keyword) and "place name" or "ZIP Code" (US markets only). WeatherIA returns information about the weather in the specified area from MSN Weather. ShowTimesIA responds to queries of the form "movie name" (as the keyword) and "place name" or "ZIP Code" (US markets only). ShowTimesIA responds with information about movies, theaters, and show times in the specified area. For more information about these InlineAnswers types, see the following topics:
Result.ResultType Property (Search)
Result.Summary Property (Search)
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InlineAnswers are reserved for users having an explicit contract with Microsoft. For more information, please contact api_tou@microsoft.com. |
The QueryLocation SourceType is a new addition to the API. QueryLocation provides query extraction from queries of the following two forms: "keyword, place name" (various markets - see the section "Enhanced Support for Markets," below, for a complete list); and "keyword, ZIP Code" (US markets only), and returns the keyword in the Title field, the place name or ZIP Code in the Description field, and the Location.Longitude and Location.Latitude of geographic center of the place name or ZIP Code.
For information about all supported SourceType values, see the SourceType Enumeration (Search) topic.
New Result Fields
Two new fields have been added to the ResultFieldMask Enumeration (Search):
The Summary field returns a concise summary of the data that is supplied by the InlineAnswers data provider. This is primarily for use on mobile devices using SMS messaging, and applies to all InlineAnswers result types. For more information, see the topic Result.Summary Property (Search).
The ResultType field returns the name of the InlineAnswers data provider that responded to the query. There are several types of results: EncartaIA, FinanceIA, WeatherIA, and ShowTimesIA. For more information, see the topic Result.ResultType Property (Search).
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InlineAnswers are reserved for users having an explicit contract with Microsoft. For more information, please contact api_tou@microsoft.com. |
New Search Flag
A new member has been added to the SearchFlags Enumeration (Search):
SearchFlags.DisableHostCollapsing disables the suppression of more than two results from the same top-level URL (host collapsing) for a SearchRequest. This is typically used by developers who want to ensure that all results are returned from a query to assist in accurate pagination.
New SortByType Enumeration
The SortByType Enumeration (Search) enables you to specify the sort order of PhoneBook results. You can choose to sort by Distance or Relevance. If this parameter is omitted, the value SortByType.Default is applied to this search; for PhoneBook requests, this default value is identical to SortByType.Distance.
Enhanced Support for Markets
An additional market, zh-CN (Chinese as spoken in China) was added in this release, bringing the total number of supported markets to 39. For a complete list of supported markets, see the topic SearchRequest.CultureInfo Property (Search). These markets apply to the Web,Spelling, and News source types.
PhoneBook results and QueryLocation results are supported in eight markets, as shown in the following list:
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Culture Name
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Language-Country/Region
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en-AU
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English – Australia
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en-CA
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English – Canada
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en-GB
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English – United Kingdom
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en-US
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English – United States
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es-US
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Spanish – United States
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fr-CA
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French – Canada
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fr-FR
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French – France
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it-IT
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Italian – Italy
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See the section "New Source Types," above, for a code sample that demonstrates the calling conventions and a result processing technique for these markets, using the QueryLocation and PhoneBook source types.
Expanded Depth of Search
In the Beta release, search results were limited to the first 250 results returned by the search engine. This limit has been increased to 1,000 results.
Filtering of Search Tags
You can now specify a string array on the SourceRequest that restricts the list of SearchTags (or elements of the array returned in a SearchTagsArray) to the specified Name element of the Name, Value pair. See the topic SourceRequest.SearchTagFilters Property (Search) for more details and a complete code example.
Filtering by File Type
The SourceRequest.FileType Property (Search) enables you to restrict the type of files return from the WebSourceType. For example, you can specify a FileType of "DOC" to return information from only those pages that contain Microsoft Office Word .DOC files.