Does the "site:" keyword and other "Advanced Search Options" apply to Bing Custom Search API?

Question

We are using Bing Custom Search, https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/bing/search-apis/bing-custom-search/reference/endpoints, and passing a site: filter along with the search. The current filter goes something like this:

https://api.bing.microsoft.com/v7.0/custom/search?q=searchTerm site:(support.somesite.com/en-us/productName)-(/productName/2/ OR /productName/3/)

My understanding is this will return results for "searchTerm" in the site support.somesite.com/en-us/productName and exclude sites (urls) containing /productName/2/ or /productName/3/.

The idea is we have a search filter where customers can select specific versions of our product support documentation to search. Selecting the filter excludes other versions of product from search results (i.e. versions /productName/2/ and /productName/3/ are excluded from search results).

However, in practice we are getting search results that contain urls with the versions we hope to exclude.

What is unclear from the documentation - do these https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/topic/advanced-search-options-b92e25f1-0085-4271-bdf9-14aaea720930 "advanced search options" work with the site: keyword as we are attempting to use them above? Or do they only work with the search query?

Is there a good way to exclude particular url paths from the search?

Answer 1

No, Bing Custom Web Search API does not fully support Advanced Search Operators (keywords), which includes the "site:" keyword.

MS Support pointed out that there is a difference between what is supported in the q= parameter between Bing Web Search API v7 (not used in this question) and Bing Custom Web Search API v7 (used in this question).

Web Search API v7 documentation (left in image)

Custom Web Search API v7 documentation (right in image)