The Bing developer team have announced that the Bing search API for developers will be now offered as a paid service through the Windows Azure Market Place. Bing search API is a service through which developers could use the Bing search engine in their applications. Bing search API was offered free until now and will be charged approximately $40 per month for upto 20,000 queries according to the post on Bing teams blog.This transition will take several weeks and during the transition the service will remain free. Though Bing team have urged the developers to try the new API service from windows Azure market place for free during transition period. After complete transition the service will no longer be available for free public use.
Many negative tweets followed after the announcement. People have asked the Bing team to keep the service free for small scale applications which have very few queries per day. The Bing team has responded saying "We are absolutely thinking about ways to enable smaller scale applications to keep experimenting with the API. Please stay tuned for more details over the next several weeks."
Google also offers such a service for a much cheaper rate than Bing's. Developers are already stating that they would switch to the Google search API.
