Do you have an idea to build something really cool with search? Would you like to get some visibility on a high traffic platform, like the Azure Blog? If the answer is yes, then we’ve got something exciting for you. Azure Search is searching for awesome projects, big and small, that showcase its power. From now until the end of the year, we’ll be collecting submissions. In January, we’ll pick our favorite project and feature it on the Azure Blog with an interview from the author as well as a technical deep dive.

We’re intentionally leaving this open ended. You can build anything from search UI that thinks outside the box, to a console app that uses machine learning to augment search results. There’s a full set of official rules at the end of this post, but here are the general requirements:

• New or existing project powered by Azure Search
• Anything from personal projects to production scale
• Project must be open sourced on GitHub under the MIT license so that the community can benefit from your work
• Bonus points for:
  • Integrating with other cloud services (Azure, AWS, etc)
  • Creativity

Once you have your project ready to go email your submission by midnight UTC December 31^st 2015 to TheSearchForSearch@microsoft.com with the following:

• “Contest Submission” in the subject
• Link to a live demo and/or video of your project
• Short write up about your project and what makes it stand apart
• Link to GitHub repo with build instructions

Projects will be judged by the following criteria:

• Use of Azure Search
  • Is search the focal point?
  • Is your application of search creative?
  • Do you take advantage of advanced features such as scoring profiles, language analyzers, indexers, or suggesters?
• Technical Innovation
  • Points for technical rigor
  • Use of other cloud services to take something complex and make it beautifully simple

We’re excited to see what you come up with! We’ll contact the winner in January to prepare the featured post that will go out later that month. For those of you who are new to Azure Search, here is some documentation to help you get started. Don’t forget that Azure Search has a free tier that supports up to 10K documents so there’s no need to spend money to enter. If you have any questions feel free to reach out to me @_Evan_Boyle with #SearchForSearch.

Read the official contest rules.