Forum Discussion
What value can ACS bring to a project
Hello all, Im Carlos Acosta! I like to be involved with the Azure community and would like to learn about ACS in general, as its an area in Azure i'm not very familiar with.
What value can it bring to a project, how complex is it to implement, are there any pre-requirements needed to be able to use the resource (type of sub)? Most importantly here to see first hand experiences using it.
- PuneetHariharan
Microsoft
Azure Cognitive Search is a cloud search service that gives developers APIs and tools for building a rich search experience over private, heterogeneous content in web, mobile, and enterprise applications.
Azure Cognitive Search simplifies a lot of complexity if you are creating an application that needs a rich search experience (think "search box" and "search results"). All that goes into creating a great search experience is available over simple REST API's: ranking that is relevant, auto-complete, suggestions, geo-spatial queries, filters, facets, etc.
We now even support new capabilities like semantic search that use the latest in AI to provide you semantic ranking and answers (this is in preview right now).
Cognitive Search Presentations to get you started:
- Intro to Cognitive Search (Ignite 2018)
- Session on creating custom skills (Build 2019)
- Session on Knowledge Store and Complex Types (Build 2019)
Cognitive Search Documentation Resources
Full List of documentation resources here, but if you want to just get started I would recommend:
- What is cognitive search?
- Quick-start: Try cognitive search in the portal
- Tutorial: Learn the cognitive search APIs
- Example: create a custom skill
Best
Puneet Hariharan
- liamca-msftHi @Carlos, thanks for considering ACS. One of the goals of ACS is to make it easy for developers to build an effective search application over your data. The important point to note about this is that it is a platform (PAAS) which means it will leverage API's that allow you to build a custom application to suit your needs. This gives you a lot of flexibility in what the application can do, but it does require the application to be created. In addition, from the "value" perspective, what we try to do is to bring in additional capabilities into search that otherwise would be hard (if not impossible) for a company to build. For example, the new semantic search capability (https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/search/semantic-search-overview) we introduced the knowledge of Bing to help do things such as answer questions based on your content and help understand the intent of a users query to find extremely relevant search results.
- liamca-msftCould you also help me understand what you mean by "first hand experiences"? Are you looking for perhaps case studies of examples? Or maybe demos or code examples on how to help get started?
- Thank you for the answer! Yes, case studies would be great. I'm more interested in the architectural point of view of Azure, so getting case studies of projects that have integrated ACS, seeing what other resources have been used alongside it, etc. For example, I saw a post saying blob storage works well along ACS, is it therefore the recommended storage resource for my data to use ASC? What alternatives can be used?
