Azure Cognitive Search (formerly known as “Azure Search”) is a cloud search service that gives developers infrastructure, APIs, and tools for building a rich search experience over private, heterogeneous content in web, mobile, and enterprise applications.
Azure Cognitive Search is the only cloud search service with built-in AI capabilities that enrich all types of information to help you identify and explore relevant content at scale. Use cognitive skills for vision, language, and speech, or use custom machine learning models to uncover insights from all types of content. Azure Cognitive Search also offers semantic search capability, which uses advanced machine learning techniques to understand user intent and contextually rank the most relevant search results. Spend more time innovating and less time maintaining a complex cloud search solution.
Using the search index you avoid operational maintenance. This fully managed cloud search service reduces the complexity of data ingestion and index creation by integrating with popular Azure storage solutions and offering index functionality exposed through a simple REST API or .NET SDK. Experience the built in configured search service with intuitive user experiences such as scoring, faceting, suggestions, synonyms, and geo-search—all while avoiding the operational overhead needed to debug index corruption, monitor service availability, or manually scale during traffic fluctuations.
Leverage tried-and-tested deep learning models from Microsoft Research and Bing to provide contextual and relevant results in your apps. Using semantic search capability, you can understand the intent of what your customers are trying to search, offer significantly improved search results and drive deeper customer engagement. Semantic search also enables summary results so your users can get instant information.
Azure AI speech, vision, and language services allow you to transform raw, unstructured information into searchable content. Easily orchestrate AI services that bring structure to your data before it’s indexed by defining your own Cognitive Search skillset. Applying AI capabilities such as OCR, translation, key phrase extraction, location, people, and organization detection is as simple as checking a box in the Cognitive Search portal.
Such security features include protecting your content from malicious acts with encryption built in throughout the entire indexing pipeline, maintaining security with support for virtual networks, meeting of international and industry-specific compliance standards, controlling per-user access to content through security filters and having access to Microsoft’s multilayer security across physical datacenters, infrastructure, and operations.
Azure Cognitive Search is available in combinable search units that include reliable storage and throughput to set up and scale a cloud search experience quickly and cost-effectively. Add search units to increase queries per second, to enable high availability, or for faster data ingestion and remove search units during low traffic periods.
