Likelihood to Recommend 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.
Read full review If your desire is to use an Azure Bing Custom Search API for a definitive solution, I recommend that you run a test instance and try it out first. Test it and you will see how easy it is to get the results you want. Take the opportunity to test how easy it is to search for your user
Read full review Pros 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. Read full review Searching API for custom search integration Recommending solutions for our products Search Engine Optimization (SEO) options Read full review Cons 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. Read full review Amount of results Marketing (still not really used) Algorithms regarding safe x non-safe x work safe Read full review Alternatives Considered 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 .
Read full review Azure Bing Custom Search is a commercial-grade solution that lets you create a highly personalized web search experience that delivers dramatically better and more relevant results. While Bing's Web Search API lets you search the entire web, Bing's Custom Search lets you select the slices of the web you want to search and control the ranking when searching within the targeted webspace.
Read full review Return on Investment 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. Read full review Increase in productivity Better yield in income Satisfied customers Read full review ScreenShots