Azure AI Search vs. Constructor.io Search

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.

Incentivized

Constructor.io Search takes all of the guesswork out of maintaining a search engine. As merchandisers or product teams, we have educated guesses at how search relevance should work but the customer is always king. We can't always predict the ways in which consumers will search or what their intent is. That's why the behavioral-driven approach that Constructor.io employs works so well. It means that merchandisers can focus on their sales and promotional responsibilities, instead of wasting time and bandwidth on base-level relevance questions.

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized

• Optimizes for business KPIs, not string matches, so merchandisers can focus on strategy instead of maintaining a dictionary.
• Gives merchandisers control to curate the right customer experience per their expert understanding.
• Customer/technical support during and after implementation.

Incentivized

• Cross platform compatibility to integrate with various OS
• Optimizing latency.
• Nothing better than work on price, create more flexible options.

Incentivized

• Visibility of the personalization algorithm.
• Exposing detailed analytics within the customer-facing dashboard.
• "Top searches" available via API.

Incentivized

Azure Search is a competitor against Google's own AI autosuggest a feature. We went with Azure because our network security folks found it to be more robust from a security standpoint, which is incredibly important when you have proprietary manufacturing information. Additionally, we're a Microsoft shop so it plugged into our cloud hosting package and client facing OS.

Incentivized

• Azure Search enabled us to stand up a robust search capability with very few developer hours.
• The fully-managed service of Azure Search means we get low cost of management (EG, DevOps) going into the future, even though the cost of the service itself definitely reflects the time saved.
• Azure Search counts as a "Cognitive Service" for Microsoft Azure consumption and aligns our products with Microsoft's interests of driving an AI-first approach in the enterprise. Microsoft Partners, service and product companies alike, should be looking to align with this AI vision as it means favorable treatment from the Microsoft sales teams.

Incentivized