Notes: "Azure Search 101 - Getting started with Azure Search with Liam Cavanagh"

Scott and Liam discuss Azure Search in the Azure Friday "shorts" series

Highlights:
* Azure Search is a search-as-a-service solution or a "poor man's search" equivalent of SQL Server FTS

* Features include search box auto-suggestions, handling of misspelled words

* No crawler involved, you have to push the content as JSON document. Instead of a pull by a crawler to index content, content to be searched is pushed

Schema

Content to index

* Pure REST-based API service which supports OData so it can be leveraged by any platform not just .NET. A query to filter search (all fields) records would have querystring key-value as follows:
&search=*&$filter=elevation+lt+1000

* To show a highlighted search result, use querystring key-value highlight={fieldname}

* How does it compare with Lucene, Solr? Search is fully-managed by Azure & it is easier to maintain & tune

* There is a free plan that allows a sandbox environment to experiment with the feature