Microsoft's Bing API Won't Be Free Much Longer

Microsoft's Bing Search API won't be free much longer. The company plans to offer the API through the Windows Azure Marketplace for monthly subscription fees beginning at "approximately" $40 for up to 20,000 queries each month. The transition will begin sometime over the next several weeks and "will take a few months to complete." In the meantime, developers can try the API for free. Specifics on the transition timeline, pricing and other details will be released soon. Says Microsoft:

(Developers) can expect the transition to involve targeting a new API end point, moderate changes to the request and response schemas, and a new security requirement to authenticate your application key. Developers using approximately 3 to 4 million queries and above can expect to transition through a separate process (details will be provided shortly).

Ars Technica notes that the Bing API's price points are pretty good compared to Google's: $5 per 1,000 queries, 100 a day free. Bing's still in the back seat when it comes to market share, as I suspect everyone knows. comScore estimates its share is about 15 percent, compared to Google's 66 percent.