Question 1

What's the difference between Azure AI Search and Azure OpenAI?

Accepted Answer

Azure AI Search is a search and retrieval service: it indexes your content and returns the most relevant documents or passages using keyword, semantic, and vector (embedding) search. Azure OpenAI provides large language models that generate text. In many RAG solutions, Azure AI Search retrieves grounded content and Azure OpenAI uses that content to generate an answer.

Question 2

When should I use Azure AI Search?

Accepted Answer

Use it when you need a high-quality search experience over your own data: website or app search, enterprise document search, product catalogs, or a RAG retrieval layer for chatbots. It’s a good fit when you want semantic relevance, vector similarity, hybrid search, filtering/facets, and managed indexing without running your own search cluster.

Question 3

How much does Azure AI Search cost?

Accepted Answer

Pricing depends mainly on the service tier and capacity (number/size of search units or replicas/partitions), plus optional features you use. Costs typically scale with index size, query volume, and performance requirements (more replicas for query throughput, more partitions for larger indexes). If you use AI enrichment (skillsets) or embeddings generation, those can add costs from the associated AI services you call.

Azure AI Search

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