AddSearch is a hosted search tool for any website from the company of the same name in Helsinki. It is presented as fast and able to works on all devices to give users full control. The vendor states users of AddSearch will experience an instant search with a modern and beautiful interface. The system has been built to scale to large amounts of users all across the globe.
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Azure AI Search
Score 7.9 out of 10
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Azure AI Search (formerly Azure Cognitive Search) is enterprise search as a service, from Microsoft.
We're very happy with the search results, and even better, the ability to impact the actual results with their weighting and priority tools. The integration was easy enough, but the expectations during the sales process was that the AddSearch team would handle more of the implementation. At the end of the day this wasn't a huge deal due to our internal engineering team, but is a caveat for others. We're happy to see continued development of the product and the infusion of AI in the feature set.
If you have a medium amount of data (2GB - 2.4TB), high-security concerns, and search is a key requirement in your single-tenant application then Azure Search likely has you covered. If you have a small amount of data per tenant (EG, about 2GB), have low-security concerns, and a multi-tenant application where search is a key requirement, then Azure Search would likely be a good choice - though you would need to implement your own concept of sharding and managing across potentially multiple Azure Search instances. If you can reflect your would-be indexes in Azure Search by depositing the data in columns in a SQL table and just index it for full-text search - and that still fits your requirements - it's probably better to start with SQL Database then scale up to Azure Search when you need the advanced features like ranking or cognitive abilities.
Like virtually all Azure services, it has first-class treatment for .Net as the developer platform of choice, but largely ignores other options. While there is a first-party Python SDK, there are only community packages for other languages like Ruby and Node. Might be a game of roulette for those to be kept up-to-date. This might make it a non-starter for some teams that don't want to do the work to integrate with the REST API directly.
In my opinion, partitions inside of Azure Search don't count as data segregation for customers in a multi-tenant app, so any application where you have many customers with high-security concerns, Azure Search is probably a non-starter.
To elaborate on the multi-tenant issue: Azure Search's approach to pricing is pretty steep. While there is a free tier for small applications (50MB of content or less) the first paid tier is about 14x more expensive than the first SQL Database tier that supports full-text search. For many applications, it makes a lot more economic sense to just run some LIKE or CONTAINS queries on columns in a table rather than going with Azure Search.
AddSearch was not as customizable as the other solutions we looked at, but it was also seemed to be the easiest to integrate. Ultimately, the integration time took longer than expected, but was still relatively easy. The interface was an easier to use interface than the competitors we looked at. Price was also a factor as AddSearch was a lower cost.
Azure Search is a competitor against Google's own AI autosuggest a feature. We went with Azure because our network security folks found it to be more robust from a security standpoint, which is incredibly important when you have proprietary manufacturing information. Additionally, we're a Microsoft shop so it plugged into our cloud hosting package and client facing OS.
