Amazon CloudSearch vs Azure Search

Likelihood to Recommend

Amazon Cloudsearch can be suitable for some queries that require fast data. For example, in our case, we used CloudSearch, in a tool called Global Search. That will search everything like names, emails and a lot of stuff in our application. If you want fast data and you have a simple query, Global Search isn't appropriate for you.

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Verified User

Engineer in Product Management

Health, Wellness and Fitness Company, 51-200 employees

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Incredibly robust software for an enterprise organization to plug into their application. If you have a full development resource team at your disposal, this is great software and I highly recommend it. Largely, however, you won't be able to use this prior to the enterprise level. It's just too complicated and cumbersome of a product.

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Blake Baron

Ecommerce & Consumer Products Manager

Midwest Tungsten ServiceMining & Metals, 11-50 employees

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Pros

Really fast queries
Good Reporting
Reduce the cost of the server

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Verified User

Engineer in Product Management

Health, Wellness and Fitness Company, 51-200 employees

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Azure Search provides a fully-managed service for loading, indexing, and querying content.
Azure Search has an easy C# SDK that allows you to implement loading and retrieving data from the service very easy. Any developer with some Microsoft experience should feel immediate familiarity.
Azure Search has a robust set of abilities around slicing and presenting the data during a search, such as narrowing by geospatial data and providing an auto-complete capabilities via "Suggesters".
Azure Search has one-of-a-kind "Cognitive Search" capabilities that enable running AI algorithms over data to enrich it before it is stored into the service. For example, one could automatically do a sentiment analysis when ingesting the data and store that as one of the searchable fields on the content.

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Erik Ralston

Chief Architect

LiveTilesComputer Software, 51-200 employees

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Cons

Can take some time to implement
The initial configuration can be tricky
Takes some time to update the values

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Verified User

Engineer in Product Management

Health, Wellness and Fitness Company, 51-200 employees

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It's an enterprise level product so you need to have the budget for it.
Challenging-to-impossible for a non-technical administrator to implement.
It further locks you into Microsoft's ecosystem and doesn't play well with non-Microsoft software. Depending on your point of view, this can be a pro or a con.

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Blake Baron

Ecommerce & Consumer Products Manager

Midwest Tungsten ServiceMining & Metals, 11-50 employees

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Alternatives Considered

I didn't investigate the best alternatives to CloudSearch, but did help with implementing this feature in our application. But from what i tested and used - Cloudsearch is very fast to get queries. Some negative points can be the time to implement this and some configurations that can be tricky.

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Verified User

Engineer in Product Management

Health, Wellness and Fitness Company, 51-200 employees

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As I've mentioned, the biggest competitor to Azure Search is actually Azure SQL Database. It doesn't have as many features, but it's more economical and most .Net applications will have one already. As long as you can arrive at a schema and ranking strategy, it's a "good enough" solution.There are a variety of search technologies (Lucene, Solr, Elasticsearch) that implement a search service. Some of them are even open source, though I would only say "free" if you do not value your time. They most likely need to be hosted via Container (or VM if you're old school), so you're incurring DevOps costs to not only set them up but monitor and maintain them yourself.

If you're already on AWS, there is almost no reason to use Azure Search. Unless you're already multi-cloud, desperately need the cognitive abilities, and don't mind a potential performance hit from looking across datacenters (hey, it could happen), you should probably just use Amazon CloudSearch.

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Erik Ralston

Chief Architect

LiveTilesComputer Software, 51-200 employees

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Return on Investment

Positive Point - Reduced the server load
Negative point - Not suitable for all queries
Negative Point - Time to implement this feature

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Verified User

Engineer in Product Management

Health, Wellness and Fitness Company, 51-200 employees

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Our internal market research illustrates that users are finding their desired information faster on account of autosuggest.
Time spent on checkout page (for conversions) is significantly decreased.
Clicks required on checkout page (for conversions) is significantly decreased.

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Blake Baron

Ecommerce & Consumer Products Manager

Midwest Tungsten ServiceMining & Metals, 11-50 employees

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Amazon CloudSearch vs Azure Search