

Azure Search Is Now Generally Available - evboyle
http://azure.microsoft.com/blog/2015/03/05/azure-search-is-now-generally-available/

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mark_l_watson
Honest question: how is this different from using the Bing search and spelling
APIs that have been available for years on the Microsoft Marketplace? I use
the Bing search APIs in a few of my apps, and have been doing so for years.

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tkmcc
Can you index your own data with the Bing search API? This looks like it lets
you run the same software that runs Bing with your own data as opposed to only
what Bing has crawled. From the link:

> You can now more easily load data from Azure DocumentDB, SQL Server running
> in Azure VMs, and Azure SQL Database to Azure Search using new indexers. The
> indexer infrastructure provides a no-code solution that allows you to point
> Azure Search to your data store where it will ingest data as well as data
> changes on a scheduled basis.

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liamca
tkmcc is correct, the other big area that people typically want is the ability
to easily tune their search results. For example, you might want to give more
weighting (or boost it higher in the search results) to an item if the search
text is found product name then if you find it is in the product description.
Or perhaps boost a result based on the proximity (geo-location) of the item in
relation to the user.

Full disclosure, I am a Program Manager on the Azure Search team.

