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What is the difference between Bing Search and Azure Search service and what to use when?

Azure Search service is not part of the Cognitive services but Bing search is part of Azure Cognitive Services as per my knowledge. Where can I find detail comparison and guidance?

One of the confusion is that there is something called Bing Custom Search which can search from your own enterprise domain or multiple private domain in addition to the slice of internet search. So if that is the case, isn't it similar to Azure Search service? So why use Azure Search service in that case? And where is the difference in this case (except that Azure Search service is for enterprise document search only). What are the advantages of Azure Search service over Bing search in this case?

Andy
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Azure Search service is not part of the Cognitive services but Bing search is part of Azure Cognitive Services as per my knowledge.

Yes, Bing search is Azure Cognitive Services while Cognitive search is a preview feature of Azure Search, supported in these regions.

Where can I find detail comparison and guidance?

Bing Web Search API searches the indexes on Bing.com for matching terms you submit. Indexes are built from HTML, XML, and other web content on public sites. Built on the same foundation, Bing Custom Search offers the same crawler technology for web content types, scoped to individual web sites.

Azure Search searches an index you define, populated with data and documents you own, often from diverse sources. Azure Search has crawler capabilities for some data sources through indexers, but you can push any JSON document that conforms to your index schema into a single, consolidated searchable resource.

For more details, you could refer to this article.

What are the advantages of Azure Search service over Bing search in this case?

Easily add sophisticated cloud search capabilities to your website or application using the same integrated Microsoft natural language stack which is used in Bing and Office and which has been improved over 16 years. Quickly tune search results and construct rich, fine-tuned ranking models to tie search results to business goals. Reliable throughput and storage give you fast search indexing and querying to support time-sensitive search scenarios. Please refer to this article.

Joey Cai
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I'll explain Azure search, bing customer search and bing search which will make it easy to understand all:

Azure search is for content stored in SQL Server on Azure, Cosmos DB, Azure Table Storage, and Blob Storage.

Bing custom search lets you tailor the search experience to include content only from websites that your users care about. Instead of performing a web-wide search, Bing searches only the slices of the web that interest you.

Bing Search is to search web pages and content on them except the customization we talked above.

Prateek Batla
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Azure Cognitive Search: It allows you to Search your enterprise data, including structured and unstructured content. You can either push your data into the index. It also has data source connectors called indexers that allow you to index data sources such as Cosmos DB, Azure SQL, blob storage, azure files, etc.

Azure Cognitive Search provide AI enrichments that allow you to transform your information before indexing it (based on Cognitive Services capabilities).

Link

Bing Search: It provides APIs so that you can get web search results programmatically.

Link

Luis Cabrera
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