Last week I posted a PowerShell function library for Microsoft’s newly introduced search engine at Bing.com.  The function library was appropriately named PoshBing. There was a log of interest in the script so I quickly moved it off my blog and onto a CodePlex project under PoshBing.

Working on the command line is fun and all, but since I spend a good portion of my time accessing my twitter account, I figured it would be a bit of fun to integrate it with my previously released PoshTweet PowerShell twitter library.

So, after an hour or so of coding it up and creating the @askbing twitter account, I’ve got it up and running.

Using it is as simple as posting a message mentioning the @askbing account.  The Usage is as follows:

@askbing [sourcetype [options]] question_or_search_terms

If you omit the sourcetype it will default to “web”.  The following sourcetypes and options are currently available:

• @askbing image iPod
• @askbing instantanswer feet in a mile
• @askbing news FFIV
• @askbing mobileweb games
• @askbing phonebook “F5 Networks”
• @askbing relatedsearch “Xbox”
• @askbing spell Is this missspelled?"
• @askbing web Apple
• @askbing translation en:es Hi, how are you?
• @askbing video The Pick of Destiny

The only source type that includes a separate option is “translation”  By default it will translate from English to Spanish.  If you want to override these languages, you can use the “from:to” option to override these defaults.  The values for the from and to languages

• Ar = Arabic
• zh-CHS = Simplified Chinese
• zh-CHT = Traditional Chinese
• Nl = Dutch
• En = English
• Fr = French
• De = German
• It = Italian
• Ja = Japanese
• Ko = Korean
• Pl = Polish
• Pt = Portuguese
• Ru = Russian
• Es = Spanish

After you post an @reply to @askbing, you should expect a @reply to your account within a minute or so.

Since I’ve only spent an hour or so on this, there are bound to be some issues so please let me know if you find any.  Here' are a few known issues:

1. It queries it’s @replies every 60 seconds and only queries 100 entries so if this ever gets more popular that that, I’ll need to enhance the request logic.
2. It only returns the first entry returned from the bing services.  I might change this to a random entry later on.
3. It has little error handling so if you get a garbled response, then that’s likely the reason.
4. It uses tinyurl for Url shortening which is sometimes fairly flaky.
5. Probably more…

So, when you’ve got some time, Send a @reply to @askbing and see how it works for you.  I’d love to hear any and all feedback.

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