Azure AI Search (formerly Azure Cognitive Search) is enterprise search as a service, from Microsoft.
$0.10
Per Hour
Luigi's Box
Score 9.5 out of 10
N/A
Luigi's Box provides personalized site search and product discovery tools for e-commerce websites. Powered by AI and machine learning, the software understands customer behavior to provide better search results and recommend relevant products, to boost e-shop conversion rates and average order value.
Incredibly robust software for an enterprise organization to plug into their application. If you have a full development resource team at your disposal, this is great software and I highly recommend it. Largely, however, you won't be able to use this prior to the enterprise level. It's just too complicated and cumbersome of a product.
Its well suited to large e-commerce stores: With a vast product catalog, Luigi's Box helps users navigate complexity by understanding search intent and suggesting relevant items. Its not suitable to highly curated stores: Stores with a very specific product line might not require extensive search functionalities, making Luigi's Box less necessary. It is also not suitable to static content websites: If your website doesn't sell products and focus on static information, a search tool like Luigi's Box wouldn't be a primary need.
Azure Search provides a fully-managed service for loading, indexing, and querying content.
Azure Search has an easy C# SDK that allows you to implement loading and retrieving data from the service very easy. Any developer with some Microsoft experience should feel immediate familiarity.
Azure Search has a robust set of abilities around slicing and presenting the data during a search, such as narrowing by geospatial data and providing an auto-complete capabilities via "Suggesters".
Azure Search has one-of-a-kind "Cognitive Search" capabilities that enable running AI algorithms over data to enrich it before it is stored into the service. For example, one could automatically do a sentiment analysis when ingesting the data and store that as one of the searchable fields on the content.
The admin of Luigis Box is very easy to learn, provides functionality as well as data for decision making. Other then that, Luigi's Box is also user-friendly for customers. So, while there is a learning curve for the initial setup in the back-end, our users are happy and converting well.
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.
We had really good references for Luigi's Box so we barely considered any other option or alternative. I must say that we do not regret so far. Mostly because the implementation was fast and easy and thanks to self learning algorithm, Luigi's Box needs minimum maintenance. The product seemed a bit pricy at the beginning but it paid of.
Azure Search enabled us to stand up a robust search capability with very few developer hours.
The fully-managed service of Azure Search means we get low cost of management (EG, DevOps) going into the future, even though the cost of the service itself definitely reflects the time saved.
Azure Search counts as a "Cognitive Service" for Microsoft Azure consumption and aligns our products with Microsoft's interests of driving an AI-first approach in the enterprise. Microsoft Partners, service and product companies alike, should be looking to align with this AI vision as it means favorable treatment from the Microsoft sales teams.
