[caryme]

In my experience with the Bing API in the last several months, I've found that you get what you pay for. Its performance has been inconsistent at best, to the point which I created the site http://isthebingapiworking.heroku.com/. The web search api frequently orders of magnitude fewer results than the actual website, a problem making a frequent theme in their developer forums http://www.bing.com/community/developer/f/12254.aspx.

By charging for their search API, I would just say that Microsoft is beginning to take their API seriously. It seems pretty clear that minimal resources, if any, were dedicated to the free version.

I'm bummed, because I've found relative success using their news search api (particularly for the article aggregation component of http://www.congressionalprimaries.org/), and now we'll have to look into alternatives, but if this means actually providing a decent product, I think this is a good move for Microsoft.