Configure Bing Search in SharePoint

Bing Search

Bing Search in SharePoint allows searching using Bing within SharePoint.

1. It requires the Enterprise Edition of SharePoint to configure this.

Advantages

Users can use SharePoint as a Central Page to search multiple search engines.

How Bing Search is done

We are using a Federated Search to do this. Here the user a search term passed to Bing.com using Open Search protocol.



There are 2 types of Searches in SharePoint. One is an Indexed Search where the SharePoint Crawler periodically collects the data of external systems and indexes them in the SharePoint database.

The other one is Federated Search that can be used for systems where Indexing is not possible or is time consuming or is resource centric or fresh results are required. In a Federated Search, the user searches a term passed to the third-party search provider using Query strings and the result can be retrieved as RSS and will be formatted and displayed in SharePoint.

Procedure

Use the following procedure.

Step 1: Create Result Source

Open Central Administration then seelct "Manage service applications" > "Search Service Application" > "Result Sources page".

Choose the New Result Source option.

Enter the following information:

1. Name Bing
2. Protocol Open Search
3. Search Term (no change)
4. Source Url bing search

Save changes.

The query string q={?searchterms} passes the user-typed term in SharePoint to the Bing URL.

The query string format=rss emphasizes returning results as RSS feeds without the Bing HTML content.

Result sources limit searches to certain content or to a subset of search results. You can also use result sources to send queries to external providers such as Bing.

Step 2: Modify Search Result Page

Now we need to associate the Bing result source to a result page.

Create an Enterprise Search Center template and Open the result page.

Choose "Page Settings" > "Edit Page" and then the "Edit Search Results" web part.

 

Choose the Change Query option.

 

Select the result source as Bing (our new result source).

 

Save changes to the dialog, web part and page.

Check-in and Publish the page.

Step 3: Test Search

Now we are ready to test the search. Open the Enterprise Search Center site and run a query. You should be able to see results from bing.com.

 

This concludes our Federates Search using Bing.

 

In the example we have modified the default search result page of the enterprise search center site. You may wish to revert the changes or delete and create another site.

 

Please note that Federated Search is possible only if the Provider enables OpenSearch compliant RSS feeds. You can see this in the provider site as shown in the following for Bing Search.

 

References

Federated Search Overview

Summary

In this article we explored how to configure Bing Search in SharePoint.