Understanding how Azure Cognitive Search is built

Azure Cognitive Search is a robust and mature service with roots in the Azure Search service that was created back in 2014 originally. The Search service was developed by using the same technology that powered Microsoft Office and Bing Search. Azure Search was retired in 2019 and the capabilities were folded into Azure Cognitive Search with newer, enhanced AI features. The service was originally developed to provide a flexible API-based search solution for developer applications without requiring infrastructure deployments. This freed developers' time up by reducing the number of hours needed to build and maintain an in-house, full-text search solution for their applications.

At its core, Cognitive Search offers two main functions, indexing and querying:

• Indexing – As with other search service providers, indexing is simply the process of loading data and documents into a repository or pointing an indexer to the...