Comparing Cloud-Hosted Search Solutions
We analyze and compare the different search solutions offered to help business owners and marketers get a complete overview of all providers. We hope this blog will help you make the right decision for your business by listing the most successful products to build an innovative search solution yourself.
Search is an essential component of the user experience in any application, be it for searching for a movie, a file, or sponsored offers. Rich search has evolved with new solutions and technologies and offers much more than simple search. Most users interact with search systems that utilize AI and semantic technologies to provide better results, personalized to their needs, and assist them in tasks such as finding files or objects.
Elastic Cloud
Elasticsearch is a popular search solution with an open-source offering and an elastic cloud commercial solution. It has full-text search and faceted search capabilities with excellent documentation and community support but lacks AI support.
The most significant disadvantage of Elasticsearch is that the user will need to get a deep understanding of the product, as there are no simple solutions or shortcuts. You may also need to deal with frequent changes in the software, which can make it very severe to implement in production.
Algolia
Algolia is a powerful search solution in the B2B space. It provides a hosted search API with various controls to help you provide fast and relevant results. Algolia is a hosted search engine that offers full-text, numerical, and faceted searches. Algolia Search features an API that supports several programming languages.
Algolia is a multi-tenant distributed search engine with dynamic clustering and global distribution capabilities. It offers built-in analytics tools to monitor usage and performance. However, the service is relatively expensive and can be out of reach for small businesses. Algolia does not have a free tier, but it does give developers 10,000 free records and 10,000 free operations, which should be enough for most developers to get their feet wet.
Azure Cognitive Search
Azure Cognitive Search is a managed cloud search service called search-as-a-service for custom applications. It uses artificial intelligence to deliver actionable insights with ease of implementation. It's also fully customizable, giving you the freedom to build and deploy a cognitive search solution that fits your exact needs.
It is expensive. Azure Cognitive Search for AI-driven Semantic Search starts at $500/month for 250,000 queries. As with many cloud-based services, you'll have to pay extra for additional resources like data storage and processing power.
Amazon Cloudsearch
Amazon CloudSearch is a hosted search service offered by Amazon that has essential full-text and faceted search capabilities and ML support through Kibana integration. The service charges per GB of data indexed, per hour indexing duration, per GB of data searched, and per hour of indexing duration to keep the index updated. CloudSearch also has a user interface that allows you to edit indexing options directly through the Amazon Web Services admin panel.
However, there are a few drawbacks to CloudSearch. First, similar to Elasticsearch, it requires technical expertise to develop and maintain. Another disadvantage of using CloudSearch is setting up your servers for load balancing across multiple availability zones, making it expensive and out-of-reach for many companies.
Seqwa
Seqwa is a low-cost AI-powered search solution with autocomplete, full-text search, semantic ranking, and semantic search. Seqwa's simple yet powerful search technology can help your users find what they're looking for more efficiently, which means less frustration and more time spent on your site or app. Seqwa also offers exciting features like personalized recommendations based on user behavior and search history to increase customer engagement and loyalty.
Seqwa can fit into several use cases like content sites with article search and personalized content recommendations, e-commerce sites with product search and customized product recommendations, document search, customized email marketing, etc.
Conclusion
Seqwa is a dedicated search platform. Whatever you throw at it, it will handle. Seqwa uses its search engine, so you get a custom-made solution that won't rely on other platforms. Unlike hosted solutions, you don't need to maintain your application to ensure your search finds content. With Seqwa, you are paying for the performance and quality of the product, not for unneeded services. The pricing is simple - there are no hidden costs or strange formulas. We offer a free trial, so you can test how good our real-time search is and why we claim that Seqwa is the way to go when building your next application.