Series introduction
Welcome to a new series of short articles I am presenting about Artificial Intelligence specifically in the Azure AI stack. The objective is that you will learn about an Azure-based AI service in no more than one minute and thus quickly get familiar with the entire stack over a short period of time. These are going short, easily digestible articles so let's get started!
What is Azure Search?
Users generally expect to interact with data by searching, especially since this is the default method used on the internet. However, it would be difficult and time consuming if every application developer was also expected to develop a search engine for use on their application. Azure Search is an attempt to solve this problem.
Azure Search is a managed service which is part of the Azure Cloud Platform and runs in the public cloud. It enables indexing and querying of data which has been uploaded to Microsoft servers. An application using Azure Search can run on Azure, on-site or on another cloud platform. Wherever the application is, Azure Search sits alongside and provides indexes which can be used to search the data. It’s currently available in over 50 languages.
What does Azure Search do?
Azure Search was designed with a number of scenarios in mind, including,
- e-commerce applications
- user generated content sites
- custom business applications
Infrastructure and availability are managed by Microsoft, so there’s no infrastructure management on your part. Functionality is exposed through a REST API or .NET SDK.
Because Azure Search is a fully managed service you don’t have to deal with the following,
- index corruption
- service availability
- scaling
- or service updates
The Azure portal provides administration and content management support as well as tools, including,
- import Data Wizard to configure indexes.
- a Search explorer which is used to test queries and refine scoring profiles.
- collect and analyse search traffic analytics.
- geo-search, linguistic analysis, data integration, cognitive search and user experience.
Find out more,