Azure Cognitive Search

Build modern mobile and web applications with an AI-powered search service.

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Azure Cognitive Search is an AI-powered platform as a service (PaaS) that helps developers build rich search experiences for applications. Create searchable databases for employees and integrate natural language processing search experiences into websites. ISVs can use the service to develop cutting-edge software as a service (SaaS) applications.

Revolutionize your enterprise data with ChatGPT, now available with Azure OpenAI Service and Cognitive Search

Workplace search to help internal teams explore databases and files

SaaS search to build intelligent, cutting-edge, market-ready SaaS applications

Website search to help visitors find information quickly and easily

E-commerce to help customers find and purchase products and services

Simplify development and delivery of search solutions

Reduce the complexity of data ingestion and search index creation through integration with Azure storage solutions and simple RESTful APIs and SDKs. Deploy a fully 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.

A user importing and connecting their data in Azure

A user creating a customized target index in Azure

A query string being searched for using Search explorer in Azure

An overview for a search service showing usage data and more in Azure

Scale totals for a search service in Azure showing numbers of replicas and numbers of partitions

An illustration demonstrating how you can easily create searchable content using integrated AI

Customize search capabilities with AI integrations

Tailor the search experience to meet the unique requirements of your organization. Azure Cognitive Search offers customizable capabilities such as key phrase extraction, language detection, optical character recognition (OCR), image analysis, translation, and role-based access control (RBAC). Take advantage of integration with Azure AI services including Speech, Vision, Language, Decision, and Azure OpenAI Service to further transform raw, unstructured information into searchable content.

Surface the most relevant results for your users

Use advanced deep-learning models from Microsoft Research and Bing to provide contextual and relevant results in your apps. Employ the Azure Cognitive Search semantic search capability to understand the intent of customers’ search terms, offer significantly improved search results, and drive deeper customer engagement. Semantic search also enables summary results so your users can get quick snippet results without the need to scroll through results links and full documents.

An illustrated search bar showing the most relevant results for the question When did humans land on the moon?

Scale to handle large datasets and high-traffic loads

Azure Cognitive Search is designed to handle large amounts of data and support high-traffic loads, ensuring that your search solution can scale as your organization grows. Whether you're a small business or a large enterprise, easily index and search through massive amounts of data to deliver a great search experience for your users without worrying about managing infrastructure.

Create next-generation apps with Azure OpenAI Service

Combine Azure Cognitive Search with Azure OpenAI Service to apply the most advanced AI language models to your search solutions using your own data as the basis for responses. Use conversational language for knowledge base retrieval on enterprise data with ChatGPT, now available in Azure OpenAI Service (in preview).

Apply AI responsibly

Get access to cloud search tools, guidelines, and additional resources that will help you create a responsible AI solution with Azure Cognitive Search.

Read Microsoft’s responsible AI principles

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We employ more than 3,500 security experts who are dedicated to data security and privacy.

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Get the power, control, and customization you need with flexible pricing

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. Remove search units during low traffic periods.

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Trusted by companies of all sizes

Beiersdorf accelerates research and innovation

“Our in-house Azure-based search engine is equipped with AI and semantic capabilities to index terabytes of data across various heterogeneous data sources—thereby democratizing Beiersdorf’s R&D knowledge among our research scientists."

Stephan Abend: Head of the Data Science Hub, Beiersdorf

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KPMG helps banking customers identify financial risk

"We think of Azure Cognitive Search as a central pillar for our engagement model because it consolidates the Cognitive Services that we already use so that we can effectively tackle unstructured data."

Athanasios Pavlou: Senior Manager, Advanced Analytics and Cloud, KPMG

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H&R Block uses Azure AI to transform tax returns

“Accessing useful information quickly is critically important to providing a differentiated client experience, which is why we use Azure Cognitive Search. “

Aditya Thadani: Vice President, H&R Block

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Real Madrid brings the stadium closer to 450 million fans

“We can create a one-to-one relationship with fans around the planet with the Microsoft solution, connecting this huge community of people and making the experience of being a supporter of Real Madrid much better.”

José Ángel Sánchez: CEO, Real Madrid C.F.

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