Add Bing search results to SharePoint results

Want to make your “search everything” really search everything? Add bing results to your SharePoint search results. You can do this as a result block (added to your results column) or as a separate results column as seen in the example at the bottom of this post.

Bing supports OpenSearch protocol while Google does not. This allows us to utilize Bing’s search engine from within our SharePoint environments (server or online). If you’re using SharePoint Server (on-prem), you’ll need to provide a proxy server for crawling and federation in central admin –> search administration.

The rest of the steps are the same for either online or on-prem:

1. Create result source
2. Create query rule

And you can do a similar process for a single site collection (through site collection settings) but I’ll be demonstrating this through central admin (for all site collections).

Create result source

1. From central admin –> search administration, click on “Result sources” under “Queries and Results”
   
2. Click “New Result Source”
   
3. Set the settings as follows, pasting https://www.bing.com/search?q={searchTerms}&format=rss&Market=en-us for the Source URL.
   
4. Leave credentials as “anonymous” and click “Save”
   

Create query rule

1. Click on “Query Rules” from the left nav in Search Administration
2. Set context to “Local SharePoint Results” and click “New Query Rule”
   
3. Name it “Bing Query Rule” and click “Remove Condition” since we want Bing to be included in every query
   
4. Click “Add Result Block” and set as follows:
   
   
   

Optional settings:

• You can set the “context” settings to apply this rule to ALL result sources, or just to the Local SharePoint Results (default)
• You can edit the result block so that a “more” link appears. Link it to https://www.bing.com/search?q={subjectTerms} to allow users to leave SharePoint and see even more results from Bing
• Choose whether you want the “Bing results” block to appear at the top of SharePoint results or ranked. I recommend ranked if you’re only wishing to supplement your search for the occasional user who thinks SharePoint search is internet search.

Implementation

There are too many ways to implement this new result source to share here, but use your imagination. Each “search results” web part can be configured to use or ignore query rules.

In this example, we’re using query rules and promoting the top two bing results to the top of our SharePoint results with a “more” link that would take us out to Bing. This method requires the result source and query rule.

In this example, we’ve created a third column on our search results page that shows the top Bing results alongside our top SharePoint results. You don’t need a query rule for this, just the added result source and a separate web part.

So finally “Search everything” can really “search everything.”