Frequently Asked Questions

Q: BootCaT gets stuck while "retrieving URLs", what can I do?

NB: please note that when you use the wrong account key (for any of the reasons listed below), Bing might block your access to the service and refuse to answer all requests coming from your computer 1) requests are probably blocked by IP address, so switching to a different network might be helpful (even correct ones) for a few hours. This means that if you realise you used the wrong account key, you might need to wait a few hours (I'm not sure how many) before you can try again with the correct key.

This could depend on one of the following causes:

you manually copied the “Primary Account Key” instead of copying/pasting it and made a mistake while typing ( tip: use CTRL-C to copy and CTRL-V to paste your account key into the relevant box in BootCaT)

you're using BootCaT version 0.60 (or earlier) which no longer works, see this page to determine which version of BootCaT you're using. If you're indeed using an old version you'll need to upgrade BootCat (you can download it from here) and get a Windows Azure Marketplace Account Key (more info here)

when subscribing to Windows Azure Marketplace you choose “Bing Search API - Web results only” instead of “Bing search API” (see this page for more info)

you used your “Customer ID” instead of your “Primary Account Key” (see this page for more info)

for reasons yet to be determined, sometimes “Collecting URLs” stops working; try the following workaround ( please note that this will make BootCaT 'forget' your Windows Azure Marketplace accountKey, so either make a copy of it before you start this procedure or sure you can retrieve it from somewhere else ):

close BootCaT

Windows XP users, remove the folder .bootcat located in C:\Documents and Settings\<your username>\

Windows Vista/7/8 users, remove the folder .bootcat located in C:\Users\<your user name>\appData\Roaming\

Mac/Linux users, remove the folder .bootcat located in your home folder.

restart BootCaT