Azure AI Search (formerly Azure Cognitive Search) is enterprise search as a service, from Microsoft.
$0.10
Per Hour
Guru
Score 9.0 out of 10
N/A
Enterprise AI Search, Intranet, and Wiki in one platform. Guru lives in tools organizations already use, so no need to context switch. Users can find info across any app, have an expert help if the info can't be found, and let Guru proactively identify knowledge gaps, duplicate knowledge, and translate it to 100 languages.
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.
Guru has been amazing in making sure my team is well-prepared by giving them information that they have been lacking. Keeping things all in one spot has been a game-changer for my team, and there are no questions about where something is located. "It's in Guru!" has been my tagline for the last eight months (since implementation)! Guru has not been great as a content keeper of PowerPoint presentations. I am looking for a solution for this, but in the meantime, we are still using a computer file folder to store all of our presentation materials.
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.
I use it to help me remember what I did and to provide tutorials that frequently need to be repeated in order to assist other employees of the organization.
Configuring an FTP program is a method that is consistent with just minimal modifications each time.
the feature to pass verification to other team members and even have Guru flag articles for re-verification on a schedule is amazing.
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.
With Guru, information flows seamlessly through your organization, cutting through meeting and chat fatigue and giving your team time back to stop looking for information and do what you hired them to do. Guru does the heavy lifting to get you set up quickly, ensuring information is readily accessible when and where it’s needed, all while improving in quality over time
Guru has always been easy to use. The only feature that seems overly complex is the analytics section, which we don't tend to look at. We've never had any difficulty with creating collections, boards or cards, or with sharing them with our internal team or external partners.
The only reason I do not give it a a ten is because I think there is still some room for improvement in meeting the different time zone needs of their customers, but overall their support is top notch. Friendly, capable, and quick.
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.
First of all, when it comes to pricing, GURU was way more convenient and affordable at the same time. Also, with administrative organizational features, GURU has more to offer and more convenience as well. All in all, we, as a Team of managers in Fabfitfun, decided to go with GURU. We surely recommend this to our colleagues.
Streamlined Knowledge Sharing: Guru has significantly improved Tripleseat's internal knowledge sharing. With its user-friendly platform, our team can easily create and access critical information, ensuring everyone stays on the same page. This has boosted collaboration and efficiency across different departments.
Enhanced Sales Enablement: Guru's role in building battle cards for our Sales team has been a game-changer. The platform provides quick and easy access to up-to-date, relevant content, helping our sales representatives stay well-informed and confident during customer interactions. This has positively impacted our sales process and customer engagement.
Responsive Support and Guidance: The Guru support team's responsiveness and willingness to assist have been invaluable. Whenever we've had questions or needed guidance, they've promptly scheduled meetings, offering insights and suggestions that have proven instrumental in optimizing our use of the platform. This proactive support has contributed to a positive overall experience with Guru at Tripleseat.
