Users expect to see that friendly search box in their applications. They seem to really like it, because it's so simple to use. You don't need a user manual to figure out search. In fact, if your application doesn't have search, you'll be pelted with negative reviews. No wonder you see search in so many applications. It's very difficult to implement. We all know it's more than just simple text matching. Those of us with database backgrounds know that searching for "prefix*" is a lot easier than searching for "*suffix". And users want to do all sorts of weird searches like "*run*", which should match ran, or shrunken or brunt, or--you get the idea. Quick search results and performance are important, as is accuracy and ranking.

Jacob Jedryszek joins Scott Hanselman to talk about about using Cognitive Services with Azure Search with your mobile and web apps. Skip hiring search experts who know what an inverted index is. Don't worry about distributed systems expertise to scale your service to handle large amount of data. And forget about setting up, owning and managing the infrastructure. Let Azure Search do it all for you.

Through integration with Cognitive Services APIs, Azure Search has long had the ability to extract text and structure from images and unstructured content. Until recently, this capability was used exclusively in full text search scenarios, exemplified in demos like the JFK files which analyzes diverse content in JPEGs and makes it available for online search. The journey from visual unstructured content, to searchable structured content is enabled by a feature called cognitive search. This capability in Azure Search is now extended with the addition of a knowledge store that saves enrichments for further exploration and analysis beyond search itself. The knowledge store feature of Azure Search, available in preview, refers to a persistence layer in cognitive search that describes a physical expression of documents created through AI enrichments.

At the recent Microsoft //build conference, we announced Cognitive Search. You may wonder what cognitive search is. To put it as simply as possible, it's Azure Search powered by Cognitive Services (Azure Machine Learning APIs). Remember when you wanted to run some intelligence over your data with Cognitive Services? You had to handle creating, for example, a Text Analytics API, then write code that would take your data from database, issue a request to the API (remember to use the proper key!), serialize and deserialize data, and put the result in your database.

Today we are announcing Cognitive Search, an AI-first approach to content understanding. Cognitive Search is powered by Azure Search with built-in Cognitive Services. It pulls data from a variety of Azure data sources and applies a set of composable cognitive skills which extract knowledge. This knowledge is then organized and stored in a search index enabling new experiences for exploring the data. In our team we see the same challenges that emerge from this on a daily basis: our customers apply information retrieval solutions, such as Azure Search- combined with AI models, either pre-built models such as Cognitive Services or custom ones, to extract latent knowledge in their vast data stores.

Microsoft can help you do amazing things with your data in the cloud! Here are five examples to help you get started. If you'd like more information about using the cloud to get the most from your data, please join us for the upcoming Microsoft Data Amp event on April 19 at 8 AM Pacific. The online event will showcase how data is the nexus between application innovation and artificial intelligence--how data and analytics powered by the most trusted and intelligent cloud can help companies differentiate and out innovate their competition. Applications show intelligence when they can spot trends, react to events, predict outcomes or recommend choices--often leading to richer customer experiences, improved business process, or addressing issues before they arise.