Amazon takes on Microsoft Search with the new Kendra enterprise search service

At Ignite 2018, Microsoft first announced Microsoft Search, an enterprise search experience that will be available across Microsoft Teams, Yammer, SharePoint, OneDrive, Office, Windows, and Bing. At Build 2019, Microsoft announced the general availability of Microsoft Search. Microsoft Search is powered by the Microsoft Graph and AI technology from Bing. And it shows the content that your organization has stored in Microsoft 365 or indexed from services including Salesforce, Google Drive, SAP, ServiceNow, AWS and others through connectors. Whether you’re searching for people, files, org charts, sites, or answers to common questions, you can use Microsoft Search insider your organization to get answers.

Yesterday, Amazon announced Kendra, a new enterprise search service that will compete with Microsoft Search. Like Microsoft Search, Kendra supports natural language queries and it can help users in finding information stored within the vast amount of content spread across their company. Similar to Microsoft Search, Kendra also supports connectors using which you can index content available in services like SharePoint Online, Amazon S3, and databases. Next year, Kendra will offer connectors for popular data sources like Box, Dropbox, Salesforce, and OneDrive.

Highlights of Amazon Kendra:

• Kendra actively retrains deep learning models built for your data set and employee usage patterns to improve search accuracy. As end-users interact with search results, Kendra fine tunes its results. This means that if you click on a result or give it a ‘thumbs up’ or ‘thumbs down’, Kendra will learn which results are more relevant and surface those first.
• Kendra gives you the option to manually tune relevance; you can boost certain fields in your index like document freshness, view counts, or specific data sources. For example, you could boost documents that are not only viewed more often but that are also more recent, like trending news or updates.
• Use natural language questions instead of just simple keywords to get the answers you’re looking for. Kendra will connect the dots within your files to return answers, whether that is a text snippet, FAQ, or document. Instead of sifting through long lists of documents to find specific answers, Kendra can provide a suggested answer upfront.

Another important thing to note is that Amazon Kendra is a paid service and you can find the pricing details below.

Source: Microsoft, Amazon