News Search Affected by Capitalization

Question

Converting from Bing 2.0 API to Azure. Not very pleased with the Azure service. Frequent timeouts. But my problem now is this:

1. Silverlight application with search component
2. I am using a Composite search and specifying as the first parameter whether it is for 'web' or 'news'
3. I was searching for 'seattle,' lower case.
4. A web search returned the correct results but a news search returned no results.
5. If I changed 'seattle' to 'Seattle,' with uppercase 'S' both searches returned correct results.
6. If I changed 'seattle' to 'SEATTLE' all uppercase letters, web search returned the correct result but news search returned no results

My code:

            // Form the query with highlighting
            var Query = bingContainer.Composite("news", "seattle", "EnableHighlighting", null, null, null, null, null, null, null, null, null, null, null, null)

                // Add the page size to get how many results are retrieved
                .AddQueryOption("$top", Request.PageSize)

                // Add the offset to get the correct page
                .AddQueryOption("$skip", Offset);

            // Start time for query
            StartTime = DateTime.Now;
         
            // Execute the query
            Query.BeginExecute(new AsyncCallback(
                delegate(IAsyncResult ar)
                {
                    // Get the duration
                    Duration = DateTime.Now.Subtract(StartTime).TotalMilliseconds;

                    // Parse the results
                    var QueryResult = ((DataServiceQuery<Bing.ExpandableSearchResult>)ar.AsyncState);
                    var Results = QueryResult.EndExecute(ar);
                    foreach (var result in Results)
                    {
                        // Do something with results...
			// Will not get here for lowercase 'seattle'
                    }
                }
                ), Query);

This is not the behavior that occurs from the bing.com search site and I'm wondering why I see it from the Azure API.

Any help, greatly appreciated, and may stave off switching to Google Search API.

Thanks,

Clyde

Answer 1

Okay, so I had dinner and came back to this problem and now it works as though it should. No difference between lower and upper case search terms. Of course, I changed nothing. Very screwy...very, very screwy.

Answer 2

Hard to say what happened here, since we did not change the service while you had dinner as well.

One potential answer: If you used "DisableQueryAlterations" flag, then the search result may be affected by spelling.

Thanks,

Max