Great search software for an enterprise organization
June 12, 2019

Great search software for an enterprise organization

Blake Baron | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with Azure Search

Azure Search is an incredibly robust component of Microsoft's Azure Cloud, which we use at our company for web hosting. We've integrated Azure Search into our website for the purpose of search queries and auto-complete suggestions when checking out via our e-commerce platform. Reducing friction to purchase on a checkout page is of paramount importance. When a user is logged in, we provide auto-complete suggestions based on their previous checkout information. This way, the user can easily tab through their ship-to/bill-to/billing information for minimum purchase friction.

Pros

  • Incredibly robust back-end infrastructure.
  • Streamlined integration into Microsoft's Azure Cloud.
  • From a user standpoint, it lets the customer easily access their data and provide useful search tips.

Cons

  • It's an enterprise level product so you need to have the budget for it.
  • Challenging-to-impossible for a non-technical administrator to implement.
  • It further locks you into Microsoft's ecosystem and doesn't play well with non-Microsoft software. Depending on your point of view, this can be a pro or a con.
  • Our internal market research illustrates that users are finding their desired information faster on account of autosuggest.
  • Time spent on checkout page (for conversions) is significantly decreased.
  • Clicks required on checkout page (for conversions) is significantly decreased.
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.
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.

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