This is Alessandro Catorcini, and I am the Lead Program Manager for Live Search API. I wanted to talk about today's announcement that we are releasing the official Live Search add-in for Mozilla Firefox.
The Live Search add-in will allow Firefox users to have an officially supported add-in for Live Search in their browser that enables query auto-suggest. The new feature integrates with the Live Search API to provide suggested query keywords, making it easier and faster for searchers to find the information they want and need.
This release, while relatively small in scope, takes advantage of the work we've done as part of our Live Search API 2.0 which enables the richest and most flexible search API offered by any major search provider. We listened a ton to developers as we built 2.0 and the we think the feature set reflects that - multiple protocol support (in contrast to only AJAX from GOOG), unlimited queries for customer-facing sites and apps, and an awesome array of result presentation options.
With this latest API release and the Open Search compliant RSS feeds that we've made available for all of our search content as part of Silk Road, Open Search clients will now be able to display query suggestions when using the Live Search API.
For developers, the new endpoint will serve Open Search query suggestions in JSON format (as they are consumed by major players like Firefox) and can be queried here.
Firefox users who want to use the Live Search add-in with query suggestions can install the descriptor file here.