Earlier last month, we had the opportunity to present our Build with Bing talk
as part of //Build 2015, in which we highlighted some Bing technologies
to make your apps more powerful and discoverable. With the //Build Tour events now wrapping up in June, this is a great opportunity to recap some of those technologies and what they can do for you.
Data show
that apps are 5x more engaging than the browser alone. That creates a
huge opportunity for you as an app developer. However, you have to face
two main challenges when creating and publishing an app. The first one
is to bring more users to your app, and more often. The app discovery and app linking technologies provided by Bing can help you with that. The second one is to keep users engaged once they’re in your app. Research suggests
that an app loses almost 80% of its active daily users after only 3
days of being installed. That’s a lot of people that might simply not
come back to your app! To tackle that problem, Bing APIs that can help
your app to provide differentiated experiences and scenarios to keep
users engaged and come back. Let’s explore that first.
The Bing Search API
The Bing Dev Center enumerates a
series of Bing-powered services and tools that Bing makes available to
developers, such as Maps, Synonyms and Translator. One of the most
essential yet powerful of those services is the Bing Search API.
The idea is simple: you can programmatically consume and embed Bing
results in your app, from web page results to images, videos, news,
related searches and spell suggestions. Even better, you can get started
for free. As of June 2015, the basic sign-up tier enables you to make
5,000 transactions per month at zero cost.
There’s a multitude of app scenarios that you can enable with the Bing Search API. Here are some ideas to get you inspired:
- You’re developing a recipes app, which enables users to search for recipes. You can use web search results to complement your recipe search results, which is especially useful when no recipe results are found and you don’t want to leave users with a dull “sorry, nothing was found” message.
- You’re developing a travel assistant app, which enables users to plan trips. You can use news results to show fresh news about the cities your users are planning to visit.
- You’re developing a chat app, which enables users to create chat groups to keep in touch with their friends. You can use image search results to let users search and pick an image to use as a group’s icon.
- You’re creating a “time killer” app, which enables users to spend some spare time exploring content about the topics they enjoy, from soccer to puppies. You can use video search results to display videos that relate to the user’s interests, in order to improve user retention.
- For any app that receives text input, you can use spell suggestions to help users with correcting and narrowing down their input.
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