Microsoft has just launched the OneNote Search API in Beta form, powered by the company’s Bing decision engine. This integration between two of Microsoft’s most popular services brings personal search to your private notes in the cloud. Here is what Microsoft had to say on the official OneNote Developer blog:

Over the last few months, we have been partnering with the folks over in Bing to integrate their search tech into our service and bring the power of full text search to the OneNote API. It’s like having your own personal search engine for your private notes and memories in the cloud. And, because we are reusing the same search tech powering bing.com today, the OneNote search API has all the smarts you would expect from Bing such as: spelling forgiveness, stemming, relevance and ranking, word breaking, phrase search, etc. The search API works across notebooks so your app can find the right notes for the user no matter where they are stored. Under the covers, there is a personal index per user so searches are scoped to only the notebooks the user has access to.

In order to partake in the Beta program, you must sign up so your notebooks can be indexed. It could take up to 2 hours for your notebooks to get picked up by the indexer. You can head over here to sign up for the program. (click the purple Sign Up button)

Microsoft plans to add support for searching across notebooks shared with the user in a future update to the API, as well as the ability to scope search queries to a particular notebook, added support for page last modified time, and relevance/ranking improvements.

Give the Beta a try and let us know how you like it!

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