The Power Platform supports connectors (See list of connectors) out-of-the-box. The current provided Bing Search and Bing Maps connectors provides capability like «List news by query» or «Get location by address».
What if you want to go beyond the out-of-the box capability and accelerate additional functionality provided by the Azure Cognitive Web Search API - v7 like search for Webpages, Entity, Images etc.?
Microsoft Power Automate provides the flexibility to connect to any API utilizing the HTTP action within Power Automate and can even be triggered by ‘listening’ to a third party webhook that would conduct a HTTP Post request to your Flow.
With Azure Cognitive Services Web search, find what you’re looking for from the world-wide-web
and include this into your business application for example enrich your data with data from various sources.
The Azure Cognitive Web Search API - v7 provides a similar (but not exact) experience to Bing.com/Search by returning search results that Bing determines are relevant to the specified query.
Prerequisite to use it is an Azure Subscription and an Azure Cognitive Web Search key to be used to connect the services.
Business scenario
In a B2B2C (Brand-Channel Partner-Customer) scenario we want to gain insights about the share of brand of our actual and potential partners to evaluate their end customer communication. To evaluate our brand against our competitors we’re establishing a share of brand metric. See below sample market insights for domains and brands.
In this article, learn how to connect to Azure Cognitive Web Search API - v7 to search on specific websites about your brand occurrence and gathering the total matched results by following the step by step guide below.
Part 1 – Test and verify your Web Search query
Before you start creating the Power Automate flow, test and verify your web search query. Azure Cognitive Web Search provides an interactive webpage to test and verify it.
Resources for query parameters are
Part 2 – Simple scenario to use Bing Web Search API with Power Automate
As we have tested and verified our web search query, we can start to automate the search using Power Automate. All Flows begin with a trigger. Flow provides hundreds of trigger options, including a HTTP webhook that is triggered by real time information. To keep our Flow simple, we use a «Recurrence» trigger.
Once we are happy with the Flow, make sure to give the Flow, triggers and actions meaningful names and leave comments where necessary!
Wrapping up
This is a very simple example of how to connect to a third-party API, make sense of the response and use the response in a subsequent action. With Microsoft Power Automate, we can build upon this to meet much more complex business needs with useful automation.
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