Suggest

A simple commandline tool to provide auto suggestions via Bing Autosuggest API.

The Github if you would like to try it out!

Inspiration

I found something similar the other day on HackerNews, but it used Google’s auto-complete API. Since I will be joining the Bing team soon, I decided to see if Bing has an open API that can do the same thing. Microsoft Cognitive Services ended up having an Autosuggest API interface to. Thankfully it also provided a really simple JSON API to communicate with.

I recently needed to do some JSON parsing in C++ and found a wonderful library by nlohmann. Thankfully it supported C++11 and was a simple drop-in header file.

This was also a great opportunity to learn how to make HTTP calls with a C++ library. Previously, I only had experience opening sockets and making TCP read/write operations. I decided to go with cURL since the I needed the ability to change the headers for the API call for the security token. Thankfully cURL has an “Easy Interface” and plenty of good examples.

Example

$ s hello world
Suggest (v1):
"hello world"
"hello world java"
"hello world history"
"hello world c++"
"hello world example"
"hello world baby"
"hello world lyrics"
"helloworld inc"