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Azure AI Search

Score7.8 out of 10

23 Reviews and Ratings

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What is Azure AI Search?

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

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Reviews

What users are saying about Azure AI Search.
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Azure AI Search: Market leader in this segment

Incentivized
Verified User
Manager in Information Technology (501-1000 employees employees)

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

  • 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.

Cons

  • Cross platform compatibility to integrate with various OS
  • Optimizing latency.
  • Nothing better than work on price, create more flexible options.

Return on Investment

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

Alternatives Considered

Amazon Augmented AI (Amazon A2I)

Other Software Used

Adobe Analytics, Amazon API Gateway, Microsoft 365

Great search software for an enterprise organization

Incentivized
Blake BaronView profile
Ecommerce & Consumer Products Manager in Sales at Midwest Tungsten Service (11-50 employees employees)

Pros

  • 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.

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.

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

Google Cloud AI

Other Software Used

Microsoft Azure, BigCommerce, Sage 50 Accounting

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

Incentivized
Erik RalstonView profile
Chief Architect in Information Technology at LiveTiles (51-200 employees employees)

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.

Cons

  • 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.

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

Apache Lucene, Apache Solr, Amazon CloudSearch, Azure SQL Database and Elasticsearch

Other Software Used

Azure Active Directory, Microsoft Azure, MS SharePoint