Microsoft has announced a new version of its search API. It’s now the Live Search SOAP API 1.0, and it’s available for download at http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb251794.aspx . This API allows up to 10,000 queries a day of Web, News, and Local content.

Updates to the API in this release include support for additional languages, the expansion of results from 250 to 1000 (good thing; 250’s pretty chintzy) search tags, phonebook results, and the ability to get local content. There’s also the ability to get local weather and movie showtimes from this API; I’m not sure what I’d do with that but it’s an interesting addition…