The bing.ini config file, located at /etc/squirro/bing.ini configures the workings of the Bing Provider.

Table of Contents

API Key

The Bing API key needs to be requested directly from Microsoft on the Azure Marketplace. It can then be configured in the section bing.

KeyUsageDefault
account_keyThe Bing News API key.(No default value)
root_urlAPI endpoint for the Bing News API.https://api.datamarket.azure.com/Bing/Search/

Source Manager

The source manager implements the polling behavior. The behavior is configured in the two sections source_manager and source_manager_web (for news and web sources respectively) with the following keys.

All values are JSON-encoded time delta objects and can contain the keys seconds, minutes, hours, days, weeks.

KeyUsageDefault for News
check_delayHow long after errors the source is polled again. The delay is exponentially increased with each error.

{"minutes": 1}

max_error_delayThe maximum delay after errors.{"days": 3}
success_delay

Delay when the Bing API request succeeded.

When no new items were found, this interval is increased with each request. This ensures that sources with very low result frequency don't use up too much of the API quota.

{"minutes": 15}
max_success_delayThe maximum delay when no new items were found.

{"hours": 12}

To avoid thundering herd problems, there is some randomness applied to these values (+/- one fourth of the delay).

Example Configuration

[source_manager]
check_delay = {"minutes": 1}
max_error_delay = {"days": 3}
success_delay = {"minutes": 15}
max_success_delay = {"hours": 12}

[source_manager_web]
check_delay = {"days": 1}
max_error_delay = {"days": 7}
success_delay = {"days": 1}
max_success_delay = {"days": 3}

Result Size Limiting

The number of results that are loaded for new sources is configured in configuration.ini using the provider.bing.prefetch_size option.

Securing the Bing Provider

The Bing Provider relies on MySQL Server to store information about searches and search histories. Connecting to MySQL relies on a MySQL user called "bing" configured with a default password. To modify the password, please follow these steps.

  1. Generate a password. Lets refer to the generated password as $PASSWORD

  2. First configure the password in /etc/squirro/bing.ini like so:

    [bing]
db = mysql://bing:$PASSWORD@localhost/bing?charset=utf8


  3. Next you would modify the password within MySQL server:

    sudo su
mysql -e "SET PASSWORD FOR bing = PASSWORD(\"$PASSWORD\")"


  4. Restart the Squirro Bing Provider service like so:

    service sqbingd restart