Bing Search in SharePoint

Friends, I am by no stretch what one would call a developer, but lack of resources often requires me to dive into code on my own.  I only needed to add a simple web search box to my SharePoint landing page, but I couldn’t find a simple way.  Google has a simple method, but I wanted to use Bing as I find their search results often more accurate.  Plus, if I’m already  in the MS stack I may as well go ahead and use their brand.

Unfortunately, Microsoft stopped supporting their method of simply adding a search box in favor of the more robust Bing API.  More power to them, but as I stated before – I am not a developer.  APIs and API documentation are useless to me unless they come with exact code samples.  I could not find a one…lot’s of code, but none of it complete.  After doing some research and scrounging I ended up with this:


<FORM method=GET action="http://www.bing.com/search" target="_blank">
<A HREF="http://www.bing.com/" target="_blank">
<IMG SRC="/PublishingImages/img_windowsBingLogo.png" border="0">
</A>
<INPUT TYPE=text name=search_phrase size=42 maxlength=255 value="">
<INPUT type="image" SRC="http://www.bing.com/siteowner/s/siteowner/Spyglass_20x20.gif" alt="Search Bing!">
</FORM>


Make an html out of it and render it in a Page Viewer web part.  It works like a champ for me.