Azure AI Search (formerly Azure Cognitive Search) is enterprise search as a service, from Microsoft.
$0.10
Per Hour
Elastic Enterprise Search
Score 6.2 out of 10
N/A
Elastic Enterprise Search Swiftype is a platform with modules for Site Search, App Search and Workplace Search, that boasts powering search for thousands of enterprises and websites. The services were developed by Swiftype and acquired by Elastic in late 2017. Powered by Elasticsearch, the vendor states Elastic Enterprise Search is fast, with proven, optimized relevance models designed for real-life, natural search.
It's very useful when used with large file systems, once the models index the files good enough, the suggestions are very impressive and produce grounded answers. Since it can natively work with blob storage the requirement for pre-processing the data is eliminated i.e. the data can be searched in its raw form, this makes Azure AI Search a very powerful tool when used with Azure Stack.
Swiftype is excellent for e-commerce companies and especially the financial services sector where speed plays a major role in executing transactions. It is also very dynamic and customizable. It is very useful for electronics/travel reservations on e-commerce sites also. The only place it is inappropriate is when it comes to indexing a website in which case Google is slightly better, as I mentioned before. There is nothing much to complain about here in regards to the breadth of applications and analytics it offers.
Like virtually all Azure services, it has first-class treatment for .Net as the developer platform of choice, but largely ignores other options. While there is a first-party Python SDK, there are only community packages for other languages like Ruby and Node. Might be a game of roulette for those to be kept up-to-date. This might make it a non-starter for some teams that don't want to do the work to integrate with the REST API directly.
In my opinion, partitions inside of Azure Search don't count as data segregation for customers in a multi-tenant app, so any application where you have many customers with high-security concerns, Azure Search is probably a non-starter.
To elaborate on the multi-tenant issue: Azure Search's approach to pricing is pretty steep. While there is a free tier for small applications (50MB of content or less) the first paid tier is about 14x more expensive than the first SQL Database tier that supports full-text search. For many applications, it makes a lot more economic sense to just run some LIKE or CONTAINS queries on columns in a table rather than going with Azure Search.
Swiftype does not have indexes ready to go. When you add a new website to the search set, it takes some time to index the website. This is something that is different from what Google does. Google in this particular aspect does a relatively better job.
Swiftype is very expensive, this makes it difficult for smaller companies to afford.
I give 10 rating because by using this endpoint and api key only we able to build that chatbot product in a timeline given by our client and also creating the endpoint and keys from the portal is also very easy for Azure AI Search and it doesn't take much time and also scalability is good.
It is good for me, and I want to rate this product 9/10. I hope they continue to improve and also offer a free plan with more benefits to learn Azure AI Search.
Google Search Appliance is no longer supported. Apache Solr is a popular, free open source solution, but it lacks a web crawler and is more difficult to configure and maintain.
When integrated with our existing file system the Azure AI Search helped users tremendously by reducing search times and improve efficacy of intended result.
Since Azure AI Search is a PaaS solution, we had very short ideation to go-live timespan, which ended up reflecting in our product performance.
A rare but not negligible occurrence was correctness of search being questionable when new data was added to the system. The search returns false positive results.
