Azure AI Search vs. Searchspring

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.

Incentivized

SearchSpring has improved our conversion rate on our website in just the few weeks we've had them on the site. It is obvious that the improvements will continue over time with the incremental increases in traffic every week.

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized

• Customize search results pages - ability to add banners or other visual creative for search results pages based on specific queries.
• Easily badge products - set thumbnail badges to show specific messages on search results pages; allows for easy identification of items on sale, featured items, or items that may be eligible for free shipping.
• Easily merchandise search results pages - can be done on a per-query basis.

Incentivized

• Like virtually all Azure services, it has first-class treatment for .Net as the developer platform of choice, but largely ignores other options. While there is a first-party Python SDK, there are only community packages for other languages like Ruby and Node. Might be a game of roulette for those to be kept up-to-date. This might make it a non-starter for some teams that don't want to do the work to integrate with the REST API directly.
• In my opinion, partitions inside of Azure Search don't count as data segregation for customers in a multi-tenant app, so any application where you have many customers with high-security concerns, Azure Search is probably a non-starter.
• To elaborate on the multi-tenant issue: Azure Search's approach to pricing is pretty steep. While there is a free tier for small applications (50MB of content or less) the first paid tier is about 14x more expensive than the first SQL Database tier that supports full-text search. For many applications, it makes a lot more economic sense to just run some LIKE or CONTAINS queries on columns in a table rather than going with Azure Search.

Incentivized

• Would like to see 4-Tell and Search Spring in one dashboard.
• Dream: Using customer demographic data plus past purchases plus browsing history to recommend products (machine learning), ability to easily manually connect specific products that the algorithm may not catch, for example, earrings and necklaces in the same style, accessory type products, etc. We would want this to work so that relating a product to another automatically works in reverse (currently it has to be done for both items).
• Ability to create custom landing page results that do not show "search results for ____" at the top
• A/B testing
• Exempting campaigns from global rules/banners.
• Advanced facet ordering logic.
• Advanced/dynamic facet labeling.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

We reviewed multiple providers 5 years ago before making the switch to Search Spring. While I can't recall the providers we reviewed we have been very happy with Search Spring. We appreciate the transparency to their product roadmap and their acquisition of 4-Tell to improve their product recommendations engine.

Incentivized

• Service cannot be downgrade or upgrade after creation
• Good tool provide maximum ROI

Incentivized

• We lost CVR when we first moved to Nextopia, however we have steadily recovered this over time

Incentivized