Azure Search provides a cloud based text indexing engine – this blog uses Azure search for its search engine. The underlying indexing engine is lucene.net wrapped in a cloud service. The search query API is provided through a REST API and a .NET SDK.
In the latest preview version of the Azure Search API, you can now execute Lucene queries that enable some new features for querying the search index:
Fuzzy Search: finds terms that are similar. For example, “blue” is similar to “blue”, “blues”, and “glue”.
Proximity Search: finds terms that are in proximity but not right beside each other in a phrase. For example, searching for “azure search” could return “azure search” but also “azure uses search” or “azure indexed by search” because azure and search are close to each other.
Term Boosting: allows you to boost one term over another in your results. For example the search query “rock^2 music” will boost results containing the word rock higher than results containing the word music.
Regular Expression Search: allows for searching based on regular expression.
Wildcard Search: allows for searching for terms that start with a specific query but then follow with multiple
- Fuzzy Search: finds terms that are similar. For example, “blue” is similar to “blue”, “blues”, and “glue”.
- Proximity Search: finds terms that are in proximity but not right beside each other in a phrase. For example, searching for “azure search” could return “azure search” but also “azure uses search” or “azure indexed by search” because azure and search are close to each other.
- Term Boosting: allows you to boost one term over another in your results. For example the search query “rock^2 music” will boost results containing the word rock higher than results containing the word music.
- Regular Expression Search: allows for searching based on regular expression.
- Wildcard Search: allows for searching for terms that start with a specific query but then follow with multiple additional characters. For example, “star*” would find documents containing “starlight”, “starship”, “starman”, etc.
In order to leverage these new APIs, you have to use the 2015-02-28 Preview API. In addition, the .NET SDK doesn’t yet support this release, so you’ll have to construct your own REST calls.
