How can I retrieve the contents of an Azure Search index?

Question

The problem:

I have created a search index for a blob store of HTML documents on Azure. I'm using Azure search to query the documents from this index.

What I would like to retrieve is the contents of the search index itself. That is I want to retrieve the entire inverted index.

What I have tried:

I have inspected the API docs and understand that I can retrieve the index definition with the Get Index operation, get individual documents, and see a sample token with the Analyze API, but do not see a way to retrieve the actual inverted search index.

Is it possible to achieve this?

score 1 · Answer 1 · answered Jun 11 '18 at 15:13

1

Search and Lookup APIs are the way to retrieve documents from your Azure Search index. If you meant being able to see the content of the inverted index, the closest thing is the Analyze API that allows you to inspect what searchable terms are extracted for any input string.

answered Jun 11 '18 at 15:13

Yahnoosh

1,932
1
11
13

Thanks for your answer. I don't really see how the Analyze API allows me to get any kind of content from the index. By the content i don't mean retrieving the documents themselves, but what is put into index for a given/all documents. Could you elaborate please. As far I understand Analyze API simply shows how the query is being broken down. Perhaps you meant feeding in a document into the API and see what kind of tokens then are used for indexing. While that's reasonable to a certain extent, that does not really answer my question. – user59271 Jun 12 '18 at 07:46
Could you please give an example of what this API would do so I can understand better? – Yahnoosh Jun 12 '18 at 14:39
Perhaps pointing to a relevant elasticsearch questions could give a better idea of what I'm trying to achieve. [Elastic Search: how to see the indexed data](https://stackoverflow.com/questions/8954785/elastic-search-how-to-see-the-indexed-data) Thanks. – user59271 Jun 13 '18 at 07:17
Which of the provided answers are your referring to? – Yahnoosh Jun 13 '18 at 20:19

score 1 · Answer 2 · answered Apr 02 '19 at 18:38

Azure Search does not currently offer a way to retrieve the actual search index. If you are trying to do something like retrieve term frequencies you will have to implement that yourself using other Azure features like the Analyze API.

You can cast your vote here to show support for this feature.

score 0 · Answer 3 · answered Jun 13 '18 at 14:18

To see the individual documents, you can use the Azure Search REST APIs for Search and Lookup or you can use the Search Explorer that is accessible from the Azure Search resource.

If you are looking at understanding how Azure Search tokenizes the documents, use the Analyze API to send sample text and see how your content is being tokenized.

How can I retrieve the contents of an Azure Search index?

3 Answers3