Here’s an excerpt from the email I got today:

A few important things to note regarding the upcoming transition:

• With the transition, Bing Search API developers will have access to fresher results, improved relevancy, and more opportunities to monetize their usage of the Search API. To offer these services at scale, we plan to move to a monthly subscription model. Developers can expect subscription pricing to start at approximately $40 (USD) per month for up to 20,000 queries each month.
• The transition will begin in several weeks and will take a few months to complete. Developers will be encouraged to try the Bing Search API for free on the Windows Azure Marketplace during the transition period, before we begin charging for the service.
• At this time, you can continue using Bing Search API 2.0 free of charge. After the transition period, Bing Search API 2.0 will no longer be available for free public use.

Please tweet me at @bobmaccallum if you have any ideas about alternative search APIs. Thanks!

And here’s “Labour Party” vs “Liberal Democrats”:

And to complete the circle “Conservative Party” vs “Liberal Democrats”:

And finally, some personal qualities compared between the two contenders for Gordon Brown’s job:

They are almost identical. Let’s try another two, MDMA and heroin:

Again they are very similar, but with a slight tailing off for MDMA (harder to make in the UK since 2008).

Now let’s try mephedrone and cocaine. The difference is massive.

Meanwhile, it is almost completely absent from the medical literature.

I mean, really, people should be cleaning their teeth every day of the week, not just before a big Saturday night out.

I also removed the “powered by Yahoo” icon because Yahoo are not serving it any more. It seems we’re using a deprecated API now, but I guess it will work for a while to come.

And while we are here, I’ll post a graph for old times’ sake:

Happy comparing!

Surprisingly, BMI Baby tops the charts for “hidden charges”, with Ryanair and EasyJet coming in a close second and third. The results for “stranded” aren’t as you might expect. It seems that Lufthansa had a well reported strike which left thousands stranded. I doubt the unions are very strong at Ryanair… I guess you want to try the phrase “I was stranded”, that should reflect customer opinion better.

Now let’s try “unreliable” vs “reliable”:

Lufthansa seem to be most often reported as reliable on the web, with Air France most unreliable. KLM are second highest in reliability and unreliability. That’s quite impressive.

Now how about not getting your bags at the carousel?

Alitalia seem to be best at losing your bags!

To mark the passing of the King of Pop, I have introduced a new category for the X-axis: “famous dead people”. By this I mean famous people who died a bit too soon.

Recently deceased Michael Jackson won’t be remembered for his musical talents, at least in comparison to Buddy Holly and Elvis Presley.

Surprisingly, the People’s Princess didn’t score highly for pretty or dumb, instead the honours go to Buddy and Michael:

Finally, let’s get even more topical and bring Wimbledon into the frame (I guess that should be ‘court’). Let’s compare Mr Jackson and Andy Murray’s personal characteristics:

You’ll need to click on the image to get vaguely legible X-axis labels:

So what do we get (on 26 June 2009)? MJ is polite but not courageous and Murray is confident but not very reliable.

The graph below sums him up perfectly. Bob Crow is a hostile, pessimistic ~@^&er. Click on the plot to get a (slightly more) legible version!

Here’s a plot of “swine flu” and “avian flu” vs. recent months:

And for a longer perspective: