Migrate from Bing Web Search v7

The call, before and after

# Before
curl "https://api.bing.microsoft.com/v7.0/search?q=open+source+vector+databases&count=10&offset=0" \
  -H "Ocp-Apim-Subscription-Key: $BING_KEY"

# After
curl "https://api.specstream.ai/v7.0/search?q=open+source+vector+databases&count=10&offset=0" \
  -H "Ocp-Apim-Subscription-Key: $SPECSTREAM_KEY"

Bing's path is its own, so the search address changes and nothing else in the URL. The header keeps its name. Your code reads webPages.value[].name, url and snippet as it did.

Every parameter, and what the route does with it

Read and used: q, count (1 to 50, 10 by default), offset (0 to 10,000) and freshness (Day, Week, Month, a from..to range of dates, or one date). Read to shape the reply: textFormat, where HTML escapes name and snippet.

Accepted and not used: mkt, setLang, cc, safeSearch, responseFilter, answerCount, promote and textDecorations. The route searches the whole live web for every call, and a client that sends these parameters is never refused.

Every field that comes back

The reply has _type SearchResponse, queryContext.originalQuery, webPages (id, totalEstimatedMatches, value[]) and rankingResponse.mainline.items, which lists each result in order as a WebPages answer. Each result has id, name, url, displayUrl, snippet, isFamilyFriendly and isNavigational, and datePublished when the page has a date.

The route does not return dateLastCrawled, because the search has no crawl date, and it does not return deepLinks or the news, images, videos, relatedSearches, entities, places or computation answers. It adds specstream, with what the Search API returns beyond Bing's fields, including the call's price_usd and request_id.

$5 per 1,000 searches

A call of up to 10 results costs $0.005. Each started block of 10 more adds $0.006, so count=20 costs $0.011 and count=50 costs $0.029. Microsoft's own replacement, Grounding with Bing Search, costs $14 per 1,000 transactions. A call stopped by a 429 charges nothing, and credit you top up never expires.

The most accurate web search API, in about one second

On SimpleQA Verified the SpecStream Search API scores 97.9 F-score on all 1,000 official questions, 978 of them correct. On WideSearch it scores 64.0 item F1 and 43.4 row F1 on all 200 official tasks. The Extract API scores 0.908 F1 on WCXB. Every score and its method is on the benchmarks page.

A Bing call for the first 10 results runs the fast search. Measured on production on November 9, 2026, its median was 0.82 s at 1 search a second and 1.07 s at 20 a second, the 95th percentile stayed between 1.09 and 1.73 s, and it answered 718 of 720. It takes up to 8,800 searches a minute on one account.

You decide what is kept, on each key

Create the key with zero_retention and a search made with it keeps no request text and no answer after the reply: it is not in the history and its log lines carry neither. spend_cap_cents is the most the key can spend.

curl -X POST https://api.specstream.ai/v1/account/keys \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $SPECSTREAM_API_KEY" -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{"name": "production", "scopes": ["account:read", "finds:spend"], "spend_cap_cents": 500000, "zero_retention": true}'

Search, pages and rows on one key

The same key reads up to 20 pages or documents a call with the Extract API at $0.80 per 1,000 pages, and a page with no text is not charged. Deep Search returns every match for a request in plain words as structured rows, at 5¢, 15¢ or $1 a row, with a source URL on every value. The most a run can cost is approved before it starts.

Grounding with Bing Search

Microsoft's named replacement, a tool for Azure AI Agents at $14 per 1,000 transactions, up to 150 transactions a second. Microsoft says developers and end users don't have access to the raw content it returns: you get a model's answer with citations, which you must display as Microsoft requires. SpecStream returns the result list your code reads, at $5 per 1,000.

Brave Search API

A search API on Brave's own index at $5 per 1,000 requests, with $5 in free credits every month and 50 queries per second, in Brave's own reply shape. SpecStream answers in Bing's shape, so the parser you wrote for v7 keeps working.

Exa

A search API on Exa's own index, at $7 per 1,000 requests on auto and $4 on lite for up to 10 results, with its own request and reply. On SpecStream a call of 10 results costs $0.005 and keeps Bing's path.

Tavily

A search API billed in credits: $0.008 a credit pay as you go, 1 credit for a basic search and 2 for an advanced one. SpecStream has no credits to count: each call is one search at $0.005, answered in Bing's JSON.