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Azure Cognitive Search

Azure Cognitive Search
Formerly Azure Cognitive Search

Overview

What is Azure Cognitive Search?

Azure AI Search (formerly Azure Cognitive Search) is enterprise search as a service, from Microsoft.

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Learn from top reviewers

Azure AI Search: Market leader in this segment

Rating: 7 out of 10
April 30, 2024
IncentivizedVetted ReviewVerified User
Azure AI Search is increasingly being utilized in the TV broadcast industry which address various challenges and enhance content delivery and management. We uses it for conten...
Continue reading
Verified user
Manager
Azure AI Search4 years of experience

Great search software for an enterprise organization

Rating: 8 out of 10
June 12, 2019
IncentivizedVetted ReviewVerified User
Azure Search is an incredibly robust component of Microsoft's Azure Cloud, which we use at our company for web hosting. We've integrated Azure Search into our website for the ...
Continue reading
Blake Baron
General Manager - Sales
Ecommerce & Consumer Products Manager
Midwest Tungsten Service
Azure AI Search1 year of experience

Still haven't found what you're looking for? Try Azure Search

Rating: 10 out of 10
November 23, 2018
IncentivizedVetted ReviewVerified User
Azure Search provides an intelligent, AI-powered discovery engine for content in LiveTiles Cloud - an Intelligence Experience Platform (IXP) that allows anyone to build a webs...
Continue reading
Erik Ralston
Engineer - Information Technology
Chief Architect
LiveTiles
Azure AI Search2 years of experience
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Awards

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Reviewer Pros & Cons

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Pricing

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Basic

$0.101

Cloud
Per Hour

Standard S1

$0.336

Cloud
Per Hour

Standard S2

$1.344

Cloud
Per Hour

Entry-level set up fee?

  • No setup fee

Offerings

  • Free Trial
  • Free/Freemium Version
  • Premium Consulting/Integration Services
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Product Details

What is Azure Cognitive Search?

Azure AI Search (formerly Azure Cognitive Search) is enterprise search as a service, from Microsoft.

Azure Cognitive Search Technical Details

Deployment TypesSoftware as a Service (SaaS), Cloud, or Web-Based
Operating SystemsUnspecified
Mobile ApplicationNo
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Comparisons

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Reviews and Ratings

(22)

Reviews

(1-3 of 3)
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Azure AI Search: Market leader in this segment

Rating: 7 out of 10
Incentivized
April 30, 2024
Verified User
Vetted Review
Verified User
Azure AI Search
4 years of experience
Use Cases and Deployment Scope
Azure AI Search is increasingly being utilized in the TV broadcast industry which address various challenges and enhance content delivery and management. We uses it for content creation and disribution. This helps us in managing workflows, quick dicision making , timely delivery of projects. This helps us to understand audience preferences , based on this content is being created considering individuals mood and interest.
Pros and Cons
  • Content recommendations, AI recommends shows and content as per viewer preferences , which enhances user experience.
  • This helps in managing workflows which makes decision making easier and time delivery of project.
  • with the help of Generative AI, it increased scalability of all AI applications.
Likelihood to Recommend
Advanced analytics and machine learning algorithms provide insights into audience trends and engagement patterns, aiding in targeted content creation and distribution strategies, it enhance user experience and create more users.
Return on Investment
  • Service cannot be downgrade or upgrade after creation
  • Good tool provide maximum ROI
Alternatives Considered
  • Amazon Augmented AI (Amazon A2I)
Product enhancement and recent updates, Azure AI Search has become more cost-effective, especially for large-scale generative AI applications2.
Other Software Used

Great search software for an enterprise organization

Rating: 8 out of 10
Incentivized
June 12, 2019
BB
Blake Baron
Ecommerce & Consumer Products Manager
Midwest Tungsten Service (Mining & Metals, 11-50 employees)
Vetted Review
Verified User
Azure AI Search
1 year of experience
View profile
Use Cases and Deployment Scope
Azure Search is an incredibly robust component of Microsoft's Azure Cloud, which we use at our company for web hosting. We've integrated Azure Search into our website for the purpose of search queries and auto-complete suggestions when checking out via our e-commerce platform. Reducing friction to purchase on a checkout page is of paramount importance. When a user is logged in, we provide auto-complete suggestions based on their previous checkout information. This way, the user can easily tab through their ship-to/bill-to/billing information for minimum purchase friction.
Pros and Cons
  • Incredibly robust back-end infrastructure.
  • Streamlined integration into Microsoft's Azure Cloud.
  • From a user standpoint, it lets the customer easily access their data and provide useful search tips.
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.
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.
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.
Other Software Used

Still haven't found what you're looking for? Try Azure Search

Rating: 10 out of 10
Incentivized
November 23, 2018
ER
Erik Ralston
Chief Architect
LiveTiles (Computer Software, 51-200 employees)
Vetted Review
Verified User
Azure AI Search
2 years of experience
View profile
Use Cases and Deployment Scope
Azure Search provides an intelligent, AI-powered discovery engine for content in LiveTiles Cloud - an Intelligence Experience Platform (IXP) that allows anyone to build a website for their organization.
Pros and Cons
  • 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.
Likelihood to Recommend
If you have a medium amount of data (2GB - 2.4TB), high-security concerns, and search is a key requirement in your single-tenant application then Azure Search likely has you covered. If you have a small amount of data per tenant (EG, about 2GB), have low-security concerns, and a multi-tenant application where search is a key requirement, then Azure Search would likely be a good choice - though you would need to implement your own concept of sharding and managing across potentially multiple Azure Search instances.

If you can reflect your would-be indexes in Azure Search by depositing the data in columns in a SQL table and just index it for full-text search - and that still fits your requirements - it's probably better to start with SQL Database then scale up to Azure Search when you need the advanced features like ranking or cognitive abilities.
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.
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.
Other Software Used
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