If you've been wondering what was simmering in the Live Search API pot these past months, wonder no more! Today we officially launched our beta for the new generation of search engine API.

Live Search API version 2.0 beta, announced this morning at PubCon in Las Vegas, is now just a click away from being live in your development environment.

There's a lot that’s new in this version:

• We now offer access through new interfaces: JSON, and XML over HTTP. Of course, you can still use our SOAP interface. But now you have options.
• You said you were spinning cycles parsing out non-web results that had been shoehorned into a one-size-fits-all response structure, and we heard you. The new API is strongly typed and offers access to seven different types of results (web, news, images, phonebook, spell-checker, related queries, and Encarta instant answer).
• We’ve opened up our Terms of Use, eliminating the pre-set usage quota. We do require that you use this API for user-facing applications only. But that’s reasonable, right?
• We’ve retained the popular capability to batch as many SourceTypes as you want into a single request with a single query string.

Exciting? What if I told you that you can apply for a pilot program that will allow you to incorporate advertisements seamlessly into your results pages, retrieving them as one more SourceType in a request? Well, you can!

To top it off, we’ve restructured our RSS interface. Now we offer the ability to use a 100% OpenSearch compliant RSS format to send requests to our web, news, images and phonebook SourceTypes.

Live Search API, version 2.0 beta is what you need to develop search applications that transcend the old-school ten-blue-results-on-a-page.

To get started, go to the Live Search Developer Center and get your AppID today!

-Alessandro Catorcini, Lead Program Manager for APIs