What is Azure Search – Search service in the cloud

Most web services, e-commerce sites and apps today have some form of built-in search function. Today's users expect search results to be relevant, personalized and lightning-fast, which in itself is a technical challenge.

There are several capable search engines available today if you don't want to build your own, for example Azure Search, ElasticSearch and Solr, all of which are wholly or partly built on Apache Lucene.

Microsoft Azure Search is a "Search as a Service" (SaaS), which means operation, maintenance and further development are handled by Microsoft. You don't have to manage the infrastructure/operation of the servers required and only pay for the amount of data and performance you use.

How does Azure Search work

The technology behind the search engine is partly based on Apache Lucene and is combined with, among other things, Artificial Intelligence (AI).

Azure Search has a REST API used to index (upload data) and query the search index. It also has an SDK for .NET that is easily installed via NuGet (package management for .NET).

A key concept in search engines is relevance or "ranking", which means the search engine calculates a score for how well your search query matches a particular record in the index. When the search results are then presented to the user, they are sorted in descending order with the highest score first.

By using "boost" you can let the search engine further increase the score for items you want to appear higher in the search results. This can, for example, be recently published articles or best-selling products.

Filtering is used to narrow down a search result. A search for "black jacket" on an e-commerce site might return 1000 hits which becomes unmanageable. By allowing the user to filter by attributes such as size, brand and price it becomes easier to find the right item and the likelihood of a purchase increases.

The advantages

Built-in AI is one of Azure Search's more powerful advantages; they call this "Cognitive Search" and it includes several built-in features, or "skills"

Some examples are:

• LanguageDetection: Recognizes which language a text is written in
• KeyPhrase: Extracts the most important sections from a body of text
• Sentiment: Analyzes whether a text is positive or negative
• Translation: Automatically translates texts during indexing
• OCR: Extracts text from images and makes it searchable

Overall, this makes Azure Search a highly capable and powerful search engine that enables a good user experience and relevant search results

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