More search solutions for websites and applications

7 min to read

Amazon OpenSearch Service

And there is another cloud service related to Elasticsearch called AWS – Amazon Web Service. AWS offers the product named Amazon OpenSearch Service for interactive log analytics, real-time application monitoring, a website search, and more. This product by the way is used by Autodesk, Compass, Pearson, and Pinterest.
As for the pricing, Amazon OpenSearch Service can be used for free with small needs of resources and hours. But in general, price should be calculated individually by filling up the price calculating form.

Microsoft Azure Search

Now let's talk about a search solution from Microsoft called Cognitive Azure Search. It is another powerful cloud-based service used by many developers all over the world. The basic features seem to be very similar to other services. But actually, there are some differences, pros and cons especially compared to other mentioned products. Here they are:

• Just like Algolia and Elasticsearch Azure provides us with functionality like full-text search, linguistic analysis, geo depending search, results based on user experience, multilingual support, autocomplete, and many others.
  
  
• Azure Search can be easily used by developers with experience in working with Microsoft products. It has a simple C# SDK, so there should be no problems while using it.
  
  
• Service uses AI algorithms that run over the data before it is been stored in the index of service. We may say that using AI used to be one of the main features of Azure Search in total.
  
  
• Azure can receive unstructured content and convert it into searchable.
  
  
• But the APIs and integration with the most renowned languages, technologies, and CMS are more restricted if we compare it with Algolia or Elasticsearch. At least out of the box.
  
  As for the prices, Microsoft Azure Search builds a pricing plan depending on used hours, resources, and region. Having this the minimal price is $0.101 per hour. There is an opinion that prices for this product rather suit big business than a small one, but the real calculation with your team will show you everything. By the way, you may start from a free pricing plan with a small amount of hosted documents, storage, and indexers per service.

Apache Solr

Apache Solr seems to be the oldest brother of all search solutions of all times, as it appeared in 2004. It is a fully open-source engine and all hosted solutions based on Apache Solr are supported by third-party companies. But if you run it as a server and set it up for your needs, you'll get a full-featured search engine, that will be totally free.
Solr is written using Apache Lucene library, the same as Elasticsearch, by the way. It has a REST-like API, which supports JSON and XML, which makes Solr integrable with lots of languages. For example, there are client APIs for PHP, Java, C#, Python, and many others.
Despite its age and appearance to similar and competitor products Apache Solr is still been contributed to and used by many developers. And if you want to integrate it into your website or application, you still can do it and get perfect results. By the way, Solr has a wide and mature community, so you can get help any time.

Lucidworks Fusion

Talking about competitors of Apache Solr we couldn't help mentioning Lucidworks Fusion. This solution is based on Apache Solr and Apache Spark. It is developed and supported by Lucidworks (San Francisco, California). But managers of Lucidworks affirm that their product is a step forward from Apache Solr. For example, Apache Spark is used for adding AI and machine learning capabilities. And other useful features are charts and graphs, which help to build and deploy search applications faster.
Like many other search engines, Lucidworks Fusion can extract data from speech, works with unstructured sets of information, performs full-text searches, and takes into account user's behavior to give more personalized results. It also works with such entities as knowledge graphs for interpretation of search queries and sharing info, generated by users between teams.
Really interesting is that Fusion has a SaaS platform called "Springboard" for non-technical specialists who want to implement search functionality into their applications. We assume that this platform offers many instruments out-of-the-box. Here we can even find the search application "Connected Search", which can be easily set up for many businesses.
And while exploring the website of Lucidworks we've got the impression that the company is focused on providing ready-to-use solutions for different business areas: chatbots, merchandising, search for agents, employees, and others.
Unfortunately, we didn't find info about pricing plans, but as we understood, every solution and product of Lucidworks has its trial period.

Other search solutions for websites and applications

There is a lot of other search solution, more or less popular among developers and business owners. They have reviews on the web, community forums, documentation, and support. We think that they deserve to be mentioned in our article, and some of them can even be competitors to Algolia, Eleasticsearch, or MS Azure Search. We will briefly mention them below, so you'll get more information and the opportunity to choose from a bigger amount of products. Here they are:

• SLI Systems,
  
  
• Celebros Site Search,
  
  
• Expert Personal Shopper (XPS),
  
  
• FACT-Finder,
  
  
• SearchBox,
  
  
• Chaossearch,
  
  
• IFinder,
  
  
• AmberSearch,
  
  
• Coveo,
  
  
• Yext,
  
  
• Klevu,
  
  
• Bloomreach,
  
  
• Swiftype,
  
  
• Searchspring,
  
  
• Hawksearch,
  
  
• Clerk.io,
  
  
• Onfido,
  
  
• Unbxd,
  
  
• Engagesmart,
  
  
• Raffle.ai,
  
  
• Constructor.io,
  
  
• Glean,
  
  
• Prefixbox,
  
  
• Syte,
  
  
• Sinequa,
  
  
• Attivio,
  
  
• IndexTank,
  
  
• Endeca Technologies,
  
  
• Exalead,
  
  
• Addsearch,
  
  
• Searchanise,
  
  
• Fast Simon,
  
  
• Tagalys,
  
  
• Amazon Kendra,
  
  
• Meilisearch,
  
  
• Dejavu,
  
  
• Jina,
  
  
• Site Search 360,
  
  
• And actually many others.
  
  

Keep on searching!