Introduction

In this article, we will discuss about the Azure Search also known as Azure Cognitive Search. What is Azure Search?. Azure Search is a Search-as-a-Service cloud solution. These days modern applications has Search options, which make users to use the application in simple. But developers know that implementing the search engine is not that much easy. But we can achieve search engine in our application without much complexity by using Azure Search.

Azure Search

Let’s understand other internet search engine products in the market right now. We all know about the famous search engines as such Google, Bing, Yahoo, etc. When a user something in the search text box, based on that search engine brings the web pages.

What Azure Search allows us to do, that it will allows us (developers) to build a search corpus containing only our application data. The source for this can be from various content types and platforms which can be customized. In simple, its an enterprise search engine. It is offer in the Azure Portal as Search-as-a-Service.

Also, Azure Search is a private search engine for our application and it is build to search within our data. Anything that we need to make searchable can be made searchable and it can be kept private.

We can use Azure Search in any kind of application like Web, Mobile, and Enterprise. There is no limit. As a developer we can create our own index, that is User-Defined Index.

Types of Querying in Azure Search

Azure Search provides some major types of search as,

• Full Text Search
• Simple Query Syntax
• Lucene Query Syntax
• Text Analysis

Full Text Search

This could be the primary case for search-based applications. We can formulate the query and we can execute a search and it searches through the text.

Simple Query Syntax

Simple Query Syntax provides some operators such as free search operators, logical operators, precedence operators, suffix operators, etc. By using these operators, we can easily build our search engine.

Lucene Query Syntax

It’s an open-source product, which has all the operators that are available for Simple Query Syntax. Also added some extensions for Fuzzy Search, Proximity search, regular expressions, etc.

Other Features

Since Azure Search is an Could based enterprise solution, it provides other features such as

• Good Monitoring and Reporting
• We can scale up whenever required
• Supports tools which we can be used to load data and configure indexers
• No complicated code to write

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