Azure no longer allowing creation of new Bing Search keys

[mefogle]

When trying to create new Bing Search resources, an error occurs and the following message is displayed :

This will come into play with self-hosting, as anyone setting up a new server will be unable to use Bing Search (unless they happen to have an old key sitting around)

OpenPin/server/src/services/search.ts

Line 22 in 915721a

baseURL: "https://api.bing.microsoft.com/v7.0",

[mefogle]

Note that "Grounding with Bing Search" has no free tier and the page on Azure Marketplace indicates that "[t]his tool can only be used as a knowledge source for the Azure AI Agent Service, in combination with other data sources." The information at https://aka.ms/AgentsBingDoc also backs this up.

[MaxMaeder]

That's really annoying about the Search API.

I know for example that OpenAI has a service that integrates with their LLM completion APIs to give the models search. Maybe this is an idea, but it would only support OpenAI models then.

Alternatively, APIs like Tavily exist, but they're very expensive. Maybe OK for self-hosting volume.

Not sure what the best option would be. What do you think?

[mefogle]

A lot depends upon how married you are to Bing... if you're willing to switch to Google there seem to be a few reasonable options (based on https://www.mattcollins.net/web-search-apis-for-llms, among others). The two that seem to come up the most often are :

• serper.dev : Usage based. 2500 free calls, then $0.30-$1.00 per 1000 depending on volume.
• apify.com : Monthly. $5.00 monthly free credits (sufficient for around ~1400 Google calls). Cheapest paid monthly plan is $39

[MaxMaeder]

Good to know, yeah Google would be more ideal. Bing was the only option I knew of at the time when I originally wrote it.

Would also be cool to have live data from

• Sports events
• News
• Anything else?

If you know of a service that can do this, that would be very valuable.

[mefogle]

Seems like apify.com would be the way to go then, since they have a wide selection of scrapers, many of them billed on a usage-only basis (i.e., they can be purchased with the $5 free monthly credit). The only catch with apify is that once you hit $5.00 on the free plan, you're done for the month unless you switch to the monthly plan. Still, this may be acceptable for self-hosted.

[mefogle]

Upon further investigation, I realized that apify's Google search uses a scraper; that is, it renders the search results in a headless Chrome browser and then scrapes the page which is... slow to put it mildly. Investigating further, I found that Brave also has a search API that is reasonably fast and offers a free tier (2000 searches per month), making it a reasonable choice for self-hosting. I updated the search service to incorporate it in this PR.