As part of our goal to empower developers to create the fastest, most responsive search experiences in their applications, I am happy to announce that as of today, Azure Search is now available in the Australia, Brazil and Japan regions.  This brings the availability of Azure Search to 11 regions throughout the world and has been a popular request from some of our top global customers.  Customers like Sitecore, a builder of premier web marketing software, is now able reach prospective and current customers in the regions where their customers actually operate.

“Azure Search is an important pillar of the Sitecore Experience Database – it enables our global customers to process customer experience data in new ways. With Azure Search’s expansion into new regions, we now have the ability to offer a solution to our customers within the Asia Pacific Region.” said Ryan Donovan, corporate vice president of product development.

Another goal is to make it easier for developers to get started quickly and learn how to take advantage of the powerful features of Azure Search. With that, I want to introduce a number of new resources available.

Try Azure Search in an Azure Website for Free

Try App Service is a new, entirely free way to test-drive selected Azure Services, including Azure Search, for up to one hour with no Azure subscription required.  We recently added a template to allow you to access a fully functional website, along with Azure Search.  Check out the tutorial on how to use this here.  This is a very basic search application, but it is a great way of getting to know some of the basic search capabilities offered by Azure Search without requiring a credit card to get going.

Download Sample Web and Mobile Applications and Datasets from GitHub

Download various sample web and mobile applications, along with test datasets at the new Azure Search GitHub repository.  This allows you to download code that has been created by the Azure Search engineering team and other Azure Search experts that incorporates best practices for working with Azure Search.  Over time, we will add more open source samples and datasets, but hopefully you will check out some of the ones we have already submitted.