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 Search Spring offers strong options for search customizations: synonyms, redirects, query replacements, spell corrections, etc. We enjoy the ability to boost and unique product display options. We were 4Tell customers prior to the Search Spring acquisition and we're looking forward to both being part of one console. Search Spring is a really solid, stable search/merch platform that I would recommend for any mid-market business.
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 SearchSpring can pull in products that match specific terms according to your customizations in their dashboard. SearchSpring can change the main image of products to reflect what is being searched for, such as a specific color. SearchSpring can account for misspellings and typos in the search bar by using search customizations. 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 Developing 'cocktails' of different ranking criteria. At the moment we can only serve results based on either 'relevancy' or 'sales performance'. It would be great to not only have the ability to blend these two options (by search term), but also add additional facets into the mix, such as stock quantity, margin, sponsorship factor etc... Provide financing reporting on results - so we know how much revenue/conversion has been driven from specific search terms. For example, "Baby Milk" drove 50 searches, 6 direct conversions (customers that searched went on to buy an item(s) that were recommended), 16 indirect conversions (customers that searched went on to buy other item(s) not severed). Read full review Support Rating We have a monthly phone call with our account manager, and she is available for calls in between as well. She has always been accessible. Working with her has been easy and she has provided training where needed. She is proactive in making sure we have everything we need and feel comfortable with the platform.
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 Nextopia’s features were on par or better than consideration set at a lower cost and with an easier implementation. Contract terms were also more favorable.
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 Increased our site search speed. Increased conversion rate. Increase in sales by boosting best sellers and relevant items throughout the year. Read full review ScreenShots