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 Very well suited for out of the box enterprise search applications.
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 Signals feature to boost search results helps search relevancy Business Rules feature for tuning search results Query pipeline design gives great flexibility in application development Read full review Cons Cross platform compatibility to integrate with various OS Optimizing latency. Nothing better than work on price, create more flexible options. Read full review Documentation can be improved Read full review Usability It is incredibly intuitive and so easy to use that business people can now complete functions that used to be limited to software developers only.
Read full review Support Rating It has continued to improve over the years.
Read full review Alternatives Considered 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.
Read full review IDOL seems to be a blackbox solution. Fusion is much more flexible with more features and options for developers to choose from.
Read full review Return on Investment 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. Read full review Allowed us to move software developers from enterprise search to other customer focused applications due to built in signals processing and related popularity boosting out of the box. Enabled business experts to work directly with Fusion to influence search results and not be so dependent on developers. Read full review ScreenShots