7.1.1. Search Fundamentals

Azure AI Search provides full-text search with AI enrichment capabilities. It's the search engine behind many Azure services and can power your own applications with enterprise-grade search.

Core components:

• Index: The searchable data structure (like a database table optimized for search)
• Indexer: Automated pipeline that pulls data from sources into the index
• Skillset: AI enrichment pipeline that enhances data during indexing
• Query: Search requests with filters, facets, and ranking

Why AI Search over a database query: Full-text search with relevance ranking, faceted navigation, synonyms, fuzzy matching, and AI-extracted insights. Databases do exact matches; search engines do relevance.