Live Search blog has announced that the Search API is now out of beta. It has been rebranded as Live Search SOAP API 1.0, to reflect the search engine that is powering it.

This release provides continued enhancements to the original API, from which you submit up to 10,000 queries per day for News, Local, or general Web content.

A host of other improvements introduced in the release are:

• Search results have been increased from the first 250 to the first 1,000.
• Search tags have been enhanced to provide results as a comma-delimited list or as name/value pairs.
• Local search is now enabled with city names and zip codes.
• Phone book results can be sorted by distance and relevance.
• The number of samples have been increased as well as a Console Application has been added to experiment with the API.