Azure AI Search vs. Azure Bing Search

Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
Azure Cognitive Search
Score 7.9 out of 10
N/A
Azure AI Search (formerly Azure Cognitive Search) is enterprise search as a service, from Microsoft.
$0.10
Per Hour
Azure Bing Search
Score 7.7 out of 10
N/A
Microsoft Azure hosts a range of Bing Search tools for enterprise applications. These include: -Bing Custom Search -Bing Autosuggest -Bing Entity Search -Bing Image Search -Bing News Search -Bing Video Search -Bing Visual Search -Bing Web SearchN/A
Pricing
Azure AI SearchAzure Bing Search
Editions & Modules
Basic
$0.101
Per Hour
Standard S1
$0.336
Per Hour
Standard S2
$1.344
Per Hour
Standard S3
$2.688
Per Hour
No answers on this topic
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Azure Cognitive SearchAzure Bing Search
Free Trial
NoNo
Free/Freemium Version
NoNo
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
NoNo
Entry-level Setup FeeNo setup feeNo setup fee
Additional Details
More Pricing Information
Best Alternatives
Azure AI SearchAzure Bing Search
Small Businesses
Algolia
Algolia
Score 8.8 out of 10
Algolia
Algolia
Score 8.8 out of 10
Medium-sized Companies
Guru
Guru
Score 9.0 out of 10
Guru
Guru
Score 9.0 out of 10
Enterprises
Guru
Guru
Score 9.0 out of 10
Guru
Guru
Score 9.0 out of 10
All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
User Ratings
Azure AI SearchAzure Bing Search
Likelihood to Recommend
8.2
(2 ratings)
8.0
(3 ratings)
User Testimonials
Azure AI SearchAzure Bing Search
Likelihood to Recommend
Microsoft
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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Microsoft
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
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Pros
Microsoft
  • 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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Microsoft
  • Searching
  • API for custom search integration
  • Recommending solutions for our products
  • Search Engine Optimization (SEO) options
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Cons
Microsoft
  • 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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Microsoft
  • Amount of results
  • Marketing (still not really used)
  • Algorithms regarding safe x non-safe x work safe
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Alternatives Considered
Microsoft
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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Microsoft
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.
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Return on Investment
Microsoft
  • 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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Microsoft
  • Increase in productivity
  • Better yield in income
  • Satisfied customers
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ScreenShots