Azure Search Service in Preview

Azure Search, which became available as a preview in Aug. 2014, offers a hosted, tunable, full-text search service. The service could be useful for external-facing applications (such as customer portals) that need to search data from a mix of document stores and databases, and in applications that analyze log files and other unstructured data sources. Azure Search could help organizations offload the implementation and resources required for search functionality to Azure. However, use of the preview service will likely require customers to build or buy integration components, and it may be too early for some production solutions.

Push Model Allows Indexing Any Data

Azure Search provides full-text search of data that customers push into the service. Customers use the service by creating an index schema and then populating the index from documents, database records, or other data (stored with Azure, with other hosters, or on-premises) to be queried. An application can then submit full-text queries to the service and obtain matching records from the index, ranked by relevance to the query.