Bing api Top and Skip not work in News queries

Question

Two questions:

Firs: I'm calling to the bing api to retrieve the news paged in 10 news per page (top=10, skip=10, 20, 30...) because if top=50 only returns 15 or 14 rows. Why cant return 50 news per call?

Second: Some times queries return one less item (this is the reason of 15/14 of the question before). For example:

 https://api.datamarket.azure.com/Bing/Search/News?Adult='Off'&$top=10&$format=JSON&Market='es-ES'&$skip=0&Query='Santiago%20Carrillo'

Return 10 news

 https://api.datamarket.azure.com/Bing/Search/News?Adult='Off'&$top=10&$format=JSON&Market='es-ES'&$skip=10&Query='Santiago%20Carrillo'

Return 9 news

https://api.datamarket.azure.com/Bing/Search/News?Adult='Off'&$top=10&$format=JSON&Market='es-ES'&$skip=20&Query='Santiago%20Carrillo'

Return 9 news

https://api.datamarket.azure.com/Bing/Search/News?Adult='Off'&$top=10&$format=JSON&Market='es-ES'&$skip=30&Query='Santiago%20Carrillo'

Return 10 news

https://api.datamarket.azure.com/Bing/Search/News?Adult='Off'&$top=10&$format=JSON&Market='es-ES'&$skip=40&Query='Santiago%20Carrillo'

Return 10 news.

I don't know if i'm doing something wrong but it's a problem to retrive an exact number of results based on pager system.

Answer 1

Hi Victor,

We will look into this one and get back to you.

Thanks,

Max

Answer 2

It took a long while, but this behavior is by design.

The reason is in very small number of results for a specific search subject, where the number of results fluctuates during the search.

Thanks,

Max

Answer 3

Apologies for taking time on this one.

We looked into this one and this is currently by design.

For small amount of news articles, the amount returned may change per query and this is expected behavior for the API at the moment.

Thanks,

Max