Azure Search

Azure Search is a search-as-a-service solution that allows developers to incorporate a sophisticated search experience into web and mobile applications without having to worry about the complexities of full-text search and without having to deploy, maintain or manage any infrastructure

How can we improve Azure Search?

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  1. Add support for using Azure Data Lake with blob indexer or new indexer

    Customer would want to use ADL as a centralized store and then use various services like Azure Search, HDInsight on top of the same document store

    83 votes
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    6 comments  ·  Crawlers  ·  Flag idea as inappropriate…  ·  Admin →

  2. Provide method for escaping characters in the search string like UrlEscape

    Special characters must be escaped to be used as part of the search text. You can escape them by prefixing them with backslash (\). Special characters that need to be escaped include the following:
    + - && || ! ( ) { } [ ] ^ " ~ * ? : \ /
    Is there a built in method, basically the equivalent of UrlEscape, which can do this, or is every developer actually expected to do their own implementation?

    81 votes
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    0 comments  ·  Query - Search  ·  Flag idea as inappropriate…  ·  Admin →

  3. Support Azure Active Directory Password Authentication in Azure Search SQL indexer

    Currently, using AAD Password Authentication mode as described in https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/sql-database/sql-database-aad-authentication-configure#active-directory-password-authentication-1 fails. Please support this option.

    79 votes
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    0 comments  ·  Crawlers  ·  Flag idea as inappropriate…  ·  Admin →

  4. Offer Elastic Search as PaaS service

    Offer Elastic Search as PaaS service or managed cluster like Redis.
    Do not want Azure search but the native ES as service with its native interface and api.

    69 votes
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    1 comment  ·  Flag idea as inappropriate…  ·  Admin →

  5. Support for Geo.distance function on customer location compared to index data

    We have clients that we want to expose using the search feature. They do not want to appear if customer is outside there catchment area.
    The Geo.Distance function can only be compared to fixed data.
    I'd like to compare this with data held in the index.

    65 votes
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    5 comments  ·  Indexing  ·  Flag idea as inappropriate…  ·  Admin →

  6. Provide option to facet on all facetable fields in a Search request

    Some applications can have a large number of facets and it is inconvenient to have to specify them all explicitly in the Search API, as reported here: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/28542665/azure-search-what-if-i-have-a-lot-of-facets

    If there were an option like facet=* that returned facets on all facetable fields, that would be easier for such cases.

    62 votes
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    0 comments  ·  Query - Search  ·  Flag idea as inappropriate…  ·  Admin →

  7. Extract text in a readable manner for pages using landscape orientation in PDF

    There is a known issue with PDFs that display certain pages with text oriented in a vertical manner. The issue is not that the text is not extracted, but rather that it is extracted in an unreadable manner since current extraction methods expect text to be horizontal. Unfortunately there is not currently a work around within Azure Search.

    We would need to inspect thousands of documents and rotate the vertical/landscape pages of the PDF manually before it can work as expected.

    57 votes
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    0 comments  ·  Indexing  ·  Flag idea as inappropriate…  ·  Admin →

  8. Extend Tag Boosting by "searching" instead of "filtering"

    Azure Search with Tag Boosting will give a boost to documents that have "exact" tags in common with the input query.

    If a tag in index is "salt lake city" and one from query is "salt lake", the document doesn't get a boost. Even worse, since I believe Tag matching is using "filter" routine, it is case-sensitive.

    Yes, we can do multi-column search, but one column search with tag boosting is a way more fast and returns better relevance results focusing on the main column.

    So it would be great if Azure Search extends the current Tag Boosting to use…

    55 votes
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    0 comments  ·  Scoring  ·  Flag idea as inappropriate…  ·  Admin →

  9. Add machine learned ranking models

    Similar to Solr's (small) capabilities
    https://cwiki.apache.org/confluence/display/solr/Learning+To+Rank

    53 votes
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    0 comments  ·  Scoring  ·  Flag idea as inappropriate…  ·  Admin →

  10. Document version support for data consistency and indexers

    External Versioning Support

    Are there any plans to support external versioning like the following: https://www.elastic.co/blog/elasticsearch-versioning-support

    We are trying to migrate off of an Elasticsearch system where versioning support is being used to allow multiple Indexers potentially processing the same document (potentially different versions of the same document).
    By using primary store’s version, we ensure that latest version of document is not overwritten by the older version of document.

    I was reading up on stackoverflow (http://stackoverflow.com/questions/28917204/azure-search-data-consistency) even with Etags support, it seems that each writer will need to read the document from AzureSearch to ensure it has the latest…

    52 votes
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    2 comments  ·  Indexing  ·  Flag idea as inappropriate…  ·  Admin →

  11. Allow suggestions for custom analyzers

    Just what the title says.

    50 votes
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    3 comments  ·  Indexing  ·  Flag idea as inappropriate…  ·  Admin →

  12. Support expressions in $orderby

    Let us have an Azure Search index with three columns:
    1. Id [Edm.String]
    2. Tags [Collection(Edm.String)]
    3. MaxScore [Edm.Int32]

    The index contains the following two entries:
    Id Tags MaxScore
    1 Paris,London,Rome 30
    2 Paris 10

    We have also a scoring profile and a scoring function of type Tag (Sum, Linear) which evaluate every tag by 10 points (boost = 10).

    We want to search the records with tags "Paris, London" in this index and sort it according to the percentage of compliance, while 100% is the value in column MaxScore.

    The problem is that by default Azure Search sorts records…

    44 votes
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    0 comments  ·  Flag idea as inappropriate…  ·  Admin →

  13. Azure Search should be able to index Cosmos DB Table API accounts / collections

    Similar to the suggestion for MongoDB support

    44 votes
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    0 comments  ·  Crawlers  ·  Flag idea as inappropriate…  ·  Admin →

  14. Support operators like startsWith, contains, and endsWith in filters

    44 votes
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    2 comments  ·  Flag idea as inappropriate…  ·  Admin →

  15. Provide sum and average on facet

    It would be nice to have agregation on certain facetable Field.
    We would define another numeric field to be computed.

    On the FacetResult, we could get sum and average exactly in the same way as count.

    42 votes
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    0 comments  ·  Query - Search  ·  Flag idea as inappropriate…  ·  Admin →

  16. Implement other highlighters

    Right now only Postings highlighter is implemented, which highlights single terms instead of full phrase query. Would be good to have other highlighters.
    As said here : https://stackoverflow.com/questions/42411353/azure-search-highlights-for-phrases-with-double-quotes

    40 votes
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    2 comments  ·  Query - Search  ·  Flag idea as inappropriate…  ·  Admin →

  17. Run multiple Indexers at once

    We have many indexes with matching indexers that scan SQL Server tables to import/update data.

    I found that during the initial import of a new large index (millions of records, taking several hours), none of the other indexers on the same service are run at all. This means that just by adding a new index, all other indexes will become stale until the large index is finished!

    Please add the ability for multiple indexers to run simultaneously.

    39 votes
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    1 comment  ·  Crawlers  ·  Flag idea as inappropriate…  ·  Admin →

  18. Clone entire Azure Search instance, just like I can clone App Service.

    I would be extremely handy if I could clone entire Azure Search instance to the same or a new Resource Group, in the same or a new location using the same or another Azure Subscription. Like I can clone Azure App Service wherever I want.

    User case: If there is an issue which is reproducible with production instance of Azure Search, then I will clone in to a separate sandbox, and take it from there. As of today, I have to create a brand new Azure Search instance, clone SQL Database and reindex them to get the same data.

    39 votes
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    0 comments  ·  Enterprise  ·  Flag idea as inappropriate…  ·  Admin →

  19. Rename existing index name.

    39 votes
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    2 comments  ·  Indexing  ·  Flag idea as inappropriate…  ·  Admin →

  20. Support picking existing index when creating an indexer in Azure Portal

    Today is only possible to create an indexer if you follow the entire process through import data workflow:

    -Select the data Source
    -Add Cognitive skills (optional)
    -Create an Index
    -Create an Indexer

    However, there are times we want to set a different schedule for an indexer or create a new one, without recreating the index.

    38 votes
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    1 comment  ·  Crawlers  ·  Flag idea as inappropriate…  ·  Admin →
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