MSN Search API in PHP

Here's some code for accessing the MSN Live Search API from PHP. You can get a developer key here by going to Configure Applications, Create and Manage Application IDs. You'll need a Microsoft Passport to get your key.

You'll need the PHP5 SOAP library enabled (make sure

extension=php_soap.dll

is uncommented in your php.ini).

To run a search on MSN and scrape results, set up a variable called

$msnsoapkey

with your key in it as a string, then call this function with three parameters:

1. A string of your query - "site:fish.com" or "seo ranter", for example


2. How many results you'd like, up to a maximum of 50


3. The offset for the start of results; 0 means give results from number 1 to $querysize; 100 means from 101 to 100+$querysize.

/////
// fetches from search.msn.com results for the query $query, using the API

function fetchMSNResults($query, $querysize, $offset) {
    global $msnsoapkey;
    static $msnsoap;

    // only generate this WSDL proxy once
    if (!isset($msnsoap)) {
        $msnsoap = new soapclient("http://soap.search.msn.com/webservices.asmx?wsdl"); 
    }

    $request = array(
        'Request' => array(
            'AppID' => $msnsoapkey,
            'Query' => $query,
            'CultureInfo' => 'en-US',
            'SafeSearch' => 'Off',
            'Flags' => '',
            'Requests' =>  array(
                'SourceRequest' => array(
                    'Source' => 'Web',
                    'Offset' => $offset,
                    'Count' => $querysize,
                    'ResultFields' => 'Url'
                )
            )
        )
    );

    $response = $msnsoap->Search($request);

    foreach($response->Response->Responses->SourceResponse->Results->Result as $hit) {
        $results[] = $hit->Url;
    }

    return $results;
}

It will return an Array() of Strings, each one containing a result URL. Easy! This is contained by a wrapper function in my code library, which manipulates the

$offset 

and

$querysize

to allow for any number of results to be returned at the courtesy of the MSN API; you can figure one out pretty easily if you need.