Can I add a Microsoft Bing search box to my site?

I agree with you that Bing is becoming quite a credible competitor to Google and that the results are show in a useful form, including info that Google just doesn't have. I'm not sure that it'll every overtake the Google behemoth, but then again, just because Ferrari doesn't sell more cars than Ford that doesn't mean it's not a cool car!

As with the other search systems I have unwrapped and reverse engineered on the site (including Google, Google Images and YouTube), the first step with figuring out how Bing works with search is to go onto the site itself and run a search, then look at the resultant URL.

A Bing search for "cherries" (get it?) produces its results against the URL:

Now we can unwrap this by knowing a bit about how method=get Web forms work:

action=http://www.bing.com/search
q=pattern
go=
form=QBLH
qs=n
sk=

Based on my experience reverse-engineering other search forms, I am going to start with the most minimal possible search box:

Here's how it looks when we actually include it here on the blog entry:

Try it. Type in a search query and click on "Go!" to see what happens.

Functional, but a bit boring. Let's make it a tiny bit more attractive by adding a bit of CSS:

Again, when I actually implement it here on the blog entry, this is what we get:

So that's your answer. You can tweak and fiddle from here... :-)