API versions of Search REST APIs

This article lists the current and past versions of the Search REST APIs for Azure Cognitive Search.

Stable versions

API version	Specification	API updates
`2020-06-30`	Swagger specification	Release note
`2019-05-06`	Swagger specification	Adds complex types.
`2017-11-11`	Swagger specification	Adds skillsets and AI enrichment.
`2016-09-01`	Swagger specification	Adds indexers.
`2015-02-28`	Unsupported after 10-10-2020	First generally available release.

Preview versions are released to test new functionality, gather feedback, and discover and fix issues. Preview APIs are available under Supplemental Terms of Use for Microsoft Azure Previews.

API version	Specification	API updates
`2021-04-30-Preview`	Swagger specification	Release note
`2020-06-30-Preview`	Swagger specification	Release note
`2019-05-06-Preview`	Swagger specification	Release note
`2017-11-11-Preview`	Swagger specification	Preview version associated with stable version.
`2016-09-01-Preview`	Swagger specification	Preview version associated with stable version.
`2015-02-28-Preview`	Unsupported after 10-10-2020	Preview version associated with stable version.
`2014-10-20-Preview`	Unsupported after 10-10-2020	Second public preview.
`2014-07-31-Preview`	Unsupported after 10-10-2020	First public preview.

This preview version includes all of the features introduced in 2020-06-30-Preview, plus the following additions:

Index alias adds a secondary name used for referencing indexes in query and indexing requests. Alias operations include create, update, delete, get, and list.
Managed identities for outbound connections. New values for connection strings in Create or Update Data Source support connections using Azure Active Directory authentication and roles instead of hard-coded database credentials or keys.
Managed identity support is also supported for key vault connections, for search solutions that supplement default encryption with customer-managed encryption.
More languages for the Text Translation cognitive skill.
More queryLanguages for semantic search and speller in Search Documents (preview).
A captions parameter to optionally request captions from semantic search in Search Documents (preview).
Semantic configurations are specified in Create or Update Index. A semantic configuration determines which fields should be used for semantic ranking, captions, highlights, and answers.
A semanticConfiguration parameter that is required for semantic queries in Search Documents (preview).

This is the current stable release of the Search REST APIs. Generally available features in this release include:

Relevance scoring (BM25)
Knowledge stores
Indexer data source for Azure Data Lake Storage (ADLS) Gen2
Custom Entity Lookup skill
Indexers running under a system or user-managed identity via Azure Active Directory

This preview version includes all of the features introduced in 2019-05-06-Preview, plus the following additions:

Semantic search, a premium feature that runs on Standard tier services and that invokes semantic ranking.
Indexer data source for Power Query Connectors
Indexer data source for MySQL
Indexer data source for Cosmos DB Gremlin API
Indexer data source for SharePoint Online
Normalizer property for text normalization, for case-insensitive filtering, faceting and sorting
Reset Documents for indexer-based indexing to specifically refresh specific documents by ID
Entity Linking cognitive skill (v3)
Entity Recognition cognitive skill (v3)
Sentiment Analysis cognitive skill (v3)

Indexer data source support for Cosmos DB MongoDB API, Cassandra API
Indexer data source for native blob soft delete in Blob Storage
featuresMode parameter that returns detailed information about a relevance score
Azure Machine Learning (AML) cognitive skill
Personal identification detection cognitive skill
Cache enriched documents to preserve and reuse image processing (and other AI enrichments)