WebProNews

This week Microsoft announced a Bing API application, which is a Silverlight feature that gives users the ability to manipulate Bing results. The software developer kit (SDK), is what Microsoft says the real news is.

"This framework is designed to provide support controls for the sample Bing component, but also to provide an additional reusable view control toolkit for implementing and using some of the advanced data metaphors shown in the Bing search component," says Bing API Lead Program Manager Alessandro Catorcini. "Components such as the CloudView, TileView, BandCloudView and StackView can be used in any Silverlight application. All the controls in this assembly support theme-ing and accessibility."

Tthe Silverlight SDK page for Bing, the framework provides: 

- Support controls for the sample Bing component

- The Bing Silverlight service runtime itself - an assembly called Microsoft.Bing.Data. This assembly houses the service proxy for the Bing API, as well as a flexible interface contract for implementing search providers, and a concrete singleton implementation for use in data binding and consuming results from Bing.

- Rich documentation of all the types and classes used in the project.

On a separate note, Microsoft launched Page Hunt, which is a game where players guess the keywords that were used to retrieve specific web pages. Dana Oshiro suggests that the game could be designed to help improve search. Silverlight is required to play.