At the end of May Microsoft announced its new search engine, Bing. Microsoft justified many of Bing’s new features by noting that 50% of search queries are either abandoned or refined – users aren’t getting the right answer on the first try, citing studies by Jakob Nielsen, Enquiro and internal testing. Microsoft also said that searchers are becoming more focused more on tasks and decisions – consequently search engine sessions are becoming longer as users work their way through their decision making process.

As data from Bing’s first full month becomes available, I thought it would be interesting to take a quick look at what the Bing rollout means for search marketers and, in a separate article, current search engine market shares.

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In part one of this article, we set out to document the little known Ask web search API by providing background information. In this continuation, we’ll look at the actual API details.

Update: Ask disabled access to their API on 6 March 2007. We are working on obtaining additional information. Write us if you would like to be notified of further developments.

The following information was determined by observation and conjecture. Write us if you want to be notified when we update this page with more complete information. We are assuming the reader has already worked with REST queries and is familiar with parsing XML data.

Request URL

The request URL is formed by adding query parameter and their values to a base URL using the format query parameter=values. Successive parameters are added using a & before each parameter.

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In this article, we set out to document the little known Ask web search API available at xml.teoma.com.

One of the many aspects of successful search engine optimization (SEO) is the periodic measurement of how well a site is performing in a particular search engine. Dimensions to measure include the number of pages in the engine’s index, the number of other web properties citing the site and the site’s performance for the strategic keywords linked to business objectives. Once raw data is collected, each of these data points is compared with other data to evaluate aspects such as page freshness.

Update: Ask disabled access to their API on 6 March 2007. We are working on obtaining additional information. Write us if you would like to be notified of further developments.

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