Azure Search allows you to create a service making your own data searchable, in much the same way that public search engines like Google and Bing make data on the Internet searchable.

Before you can begin using Azure Search, you must perform the following actions:

  1. Create Azure Search Service
  2. Create Index
  3. Import data
  4. Index the data

This article will show how to create an Azure Search Service.

Navigate to the Azure portal and log in.

Click the [Create a Resource] button (Fig. 1) to display a list of Azure resource categories.

as01-CreateResourceButton
Fig. 1

At the Search box, enter "Azure Search" and press Enter, as shown in Fig. 2.

as02-SearchAzureSearch
Fig. 2

From the list of matching services, click on "Azure Search", as shown in Fig. 3.

as03-SelectAzureSearch
Fig. 3

A blade describing the features of Azure search displays, as shown in Fig. 4.

as03-SelectAzureSearch
Fig. 4

Click the [Create] button at the bottom of this blade.

The "New Search Service" blade displays, as shown in Fig. 5.

as04-CreateAzureSearch
Fig. 5

At the "URL" field, enter a unique name for this service. The service will expose a REST endpoint with the URL: https://xxxx.search.windows.net, where xxxx is the name you enter here.

At the "Subscription" dropdown, select the Subscription in which you want to store this service.

At the "Resource group" dropdown, select the resource group in which to store this service or click the "Create new" link to add a new resource group, as shown in Fig. 6.

as06-NewResourceGroup
Fig. 6

At the "Location" dropdown, select the region in which you want to store this service. The region should be near the users of the service or near the data you intend to index.

At the "Pricing tier" field, select an appropriate pricing tier. Clicking this field expands the "Choose your pricing tier" blade (Fig. 7), which displays the approximately monthly cost and the features of each tier.

as07-PricingTier
Fig. 7

When you have completed all the fields in the "New Search Service" blade, click the [Create] button to create the service.

When the service is created, you can navigate to it, as shown in Fig. 8.

as08-OverviewBlade
Fig. 8

This article showed how to create a new Azure Search Service. In the next article, we will create an Index for this service.