Blogs by Ashwin

  Introduction Imagine you are employed by a company creating an app aimed at local tourists. You possess a vast amount of data regarding local attractions, yet when users look for information, they occasionally do not see the most pertinent articles at the forefront of their search results. In order to enhance the user experience of your app, you have to explore methods to provide users with more relevant results through the use of Azure AI Search. What is Semantic Ranking? Semantic ranking is a feature in Azure AI Search designed to enhance the order of search results. It leverages language understanding to more effectively align the context of the user's original query with the ranking of the search results. BM25 Ranking Function Azure AI Search, by default, utilizes the BM25 ranking function. The BM25 ranking function evaluates search results based on how often the search term is found in a document. Typically, the BM25 ranking function produces high-quality rankings, as docume...

  Debug Search Issues Using Azure Portal When you initially set up your search service, you need to establish certain assumptions regarding the data you will be indexing. You decide on the structure of the index and the method for ingesting that data. Yet, you won't be able to confirm whether all your decisions were correct until you execute your built indexer. Explore How To Use Debug Session Tool In Azure AI Search The Debug Session tool is an interactive visual editor that allows you to navigate through the enrichment pipeline of a document during its enrichment process. You can enter each specific skill, apply modifications and corrections, and then execute the indexer in real-time. After addressing any problems, you can refresh and republish the indexer so it can be re-executed to enrich all documents within your index. Once you have assigned a name to your debug session and selected the index for debugging, the search service transfers all necessary components to an Azure Sto...

  Monitor an Azure AI Search Solution Azure Monitor may provide you with information on the performance and usage of your search service. Additionally, you can get notifications to let you know about problems before they happen. Monitor Azure AI Search in Azure Monitor You may view your current search latency, queries per second, and the percentage of throttledqueries as soon as you start up your Azure AI Search service. The Monitoring tab of the Overview page displays this data. You can also check what resources your search solution is using on the Usage tab. You can monitor with additional setup, but this basic information is an excellent place to start.You will be aware that Azure Monitor can be utilized for all of your Azure resources if you are accustomed to maintaining other Azure platform resources. Once you have started using Log Analytics, you get access to performance and diagnostic data in these log tables: AzureActivity - Shows you tasks that have been executed like sca...

  Make Your Search Solution Highly Available One straightforward method to enhance the availability of your search solution is by increasing the quantity of replicas. The sole choice is to maintain more than one within the paid search service tiers. The Azure AI Search service has availability guarantees based on the number of replicas you have: Two replicas guarantee 99.9% availability for your queries Three or more replicas guarantee 99.9% availability for both queries and indexing The alternative method to incorporate redundancy into your search solution is by utilizing Availability Zones. This approach necessitates the use of at least a standard tier. When you create replicas, you have the option to place them in various Availability Zones. The advantage of spreading your replicas this way is that they are situated in separate data centers. Distribute Your Search Solution Globally A single resource group and region is the most economical method to design an Azure AI Search serv...

  Manage Costs Of An Azure AI Search Solution The capacity and features you utilize determine how much an Azure AI Search solution will cost to operate. Estimate Your Search Solutions Baseline Costs An excellent tool for estimating the cost of utilizing any Azure service is the Azure pricing calculator. Make use of it to establish a baseline for your search service requirements. Browse to the Azure AI Search pricing calculator. Choose your region, currency, and hour or monthly pricing. Optimizing Azure AI Search's capacity, including the tier you require, the data you're searching, and the features you utilize, is a crucial part of maintaining an affordable Azure AI Search solution. Understand Billing Model Azure AI Search is invoiced similarly to other Azure resources. You are not charged for the number of search queries, responses, or documents ingested. Tips To Reduce Cost Of Your Search Solution These tips can help you reduce the cost of running your search solution: Minim...

  Optimize Your Index Size and Schema The effectiveness of your search queries is closely linked to the size and intricacy of your indexes. The quicker Azure AI Search can answer queries, the more compact and streamlined your indexes are. If you don't pay attention, indexes can grow over time. You should review that all the documents in your index are still relevant and need to be searchable. Consider reviewing all the attributes you've enabled on each field. For example, adding support for filters, facets, and sorting can quadruple the storage needed to support your index. Improve Performance Of Your Queries If you're familiar with the workings of the search service, you can optimize your queries to significantly enhance performance. Use this checklist for writing better queries: Only specify the fields you need to search using the searchFields parameter. As more fields require extra processing. Return the smallest number of fields you need to render on your search results...

  Optimize Performance of an Azure AI Search Solution The size and complexity of your indexes may affect search solutions’ performance. Additionally, You also need to know how to write efficient queries to search it and choose the right service tier. Measure Your Current Search Performance If you don't know how well your search service works, you can't optimize. Establish a baseline performance benchmark so you can verify the advancements you achieve and monitor any decline in performance over time. To start with, enable diagnostic logging using Log Analytics: In the Azure portal, select Diagnostic settings. Give your diagnostic setting a name. Select allLogs and AllMetrics. Select Send to Log Analytics workspace. Choose, or create, your Log Analytics workspace. This diagnostic data must be recorded at the search service level. Your end users or apps may experience performance problems in a number of locations. If you can demonstrate that your search service is operating effici...

  Authenticate Requests To Your Search Solution Your attention may go to how to verify search requests from your users and apps once you have the infrastructure in place to lessen the attack surface of your search solution. Key-based authentication is the default setting when you set up your ACS. There are two different kinds of keys: Admin Keys - grant write permissions and the right to query system information (maximum of 2 admin keys can be created per search service) Query Keys - grant read permissions and are used by your users or apps to query indexes (maximum of 50 query keys can be created per search service) Role-based access control (RBAC) is provided by the Azure platform as a global system to control access to resources. You can use RBAC in Azure AI Search in the following ways: Roles can be granted access to administer the service Define roles with access to create, load, and query indexes The built-in roles you can assign to manage the Azure AI Search serv...