Understand capabilities of Azure Cognitive Search

  • 3 minutes

Searching for information is a common requirement in many applications, from dedicated search engine web sites to mobile apps that can find context-appropriate information based on where you are and what you want to accomplish.

Diagram of a search solution using AI services to extract insights from data and create an index for search.

Azure AI Search is an Applied AI Service that enables you to ingest and index data from various sources, and search the index to find, filter, and sort information extracted from the source data.

In addition to basic text-based indexing, Azure AI Search enables you to define an enrichment pipeline that uses AI skills to enhance the index with insights derived from the source data - for example, by using computer vision and natural language processing capabilities to generate descriptions of images, extract text from scanned documents, and determine key phrases in large documents that encapsulate their key points.

Not only does this AI enrichment produce a more useful search experience, the insights extracted by your enrichment pipeline can be persisted in a knowledge store for further analysis or integration into a data pipeline for a business intelligence solution.

Note

To learn more, see the Azure AI Search page.