Azure AI Search is a managed cloud service for enterprise search applications. It supports vector retrieval over embeddings and scales beyond locally hosted Redis for large corpora, indexes, and production workloads. section 8.2
Its search architecture combines several retrieval capabilities:
- Vector search retrieves objects semantically similar to a query through vector embeddings. section 8.2
- Hybrid search combines full-text and vector queries against an index containing plain text and generated embeddings. section 8.2
- Hybrid requests can use filtering, faceting, sorting, scoring profiles, and semantic ranking, then return one result set through reciprocal rank fusion. section 8.2
- The service indexes structured, semi-structured, and unstructured data and provides enterprise controls including encryption and role-based access control. section 8.2
