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Hey everybody welcome to another exciting episode of Data Exposed,
I'm your host, Scott Cline.
With me, back by popular demand, Liam Cavanaugh.
>> Hey, thanks for having me again.
>> How are you doing?
>> It's great, I love the new studios.
I know you've had it for a while, but man, this is beautiful.
I don't know which camera to look at, this is so cool.
>> About a month, we've had this.
>> So awesome, it's been a long- >> This is, so, Liam's here,
because we were just walking down the hall, and I ran into him.
He's like, let's do a show.
I'm like, I got some availability, come on by.
>> So we just got it going.
We'll see how this goes.
>> All right, let's see how this goes.
Obviously you're here to talk about Search, but
Search as far as >> The what are we talking about?
>> So we got a couple of new things- >> Yup.
>> So it's been a while since we've been there so
one of the thing I wanted to go through
is not only some of the analytics that you can do.
>> Okay. >> But one of the other cool
features called synonyms.
>> Okay. >> That we've added.
Some of the uses and the reasons why you may wanna do that.
>> Okay, sweet all right let's go.
>> Shall we should do it?
Okay so what I have here is a search service and
this is a real estate dataset that we created it's.
It's 5 million listings of randomly created listings with descriptions,
geolocation around the US.
So it's a pretty cool dataset to use, but
what I thought I'd do is use this as a basis to show how we can
make use of something called synonyms.
>> Okay. >> Which is the idea,
if you think about what people are searching for, it's not always
an exact match to what is actually >> Yep, mine just went off,
so we'll just keep going [LAUGH].
>> Ignore that.
So what people are searching for
is not always an exact match to what you have in your content.
So what I wanna do is, through both the analytics as well as
the synonyms, show how we can start adding this customized dictionary.
>> So that as people start searching for
those words you can match them to the right content.
>> Very good.
>> So what I'm going to do is first of all I'm going to tie it into
PowerBI.
And if you just click on services here.
What we can do is we can link into our Azure search service where we
are actually logging the information.
So if I go down just a little bit here you'll see that Azure search is
one of the entire here, I'm gonna choose get and
what it's gonna do is say okay where are you actually logging
all of your search operations.
So the way that I find that is by just going into here and
under all settings.
>> Enter your search service.
>> Yeah so for my search service.
We have this thing called Search Traffic Analytics.
>> Okay.
>> And all you need to do is you just need to specify
an Azure storage account for where you're going to log this.
This is completely optional whether you log the metrics such as latency,
number of queries.
As well as the operations.
So what this is gonna do in a second, is just come back a give me
my storage account for where this is actually gonna be logged.
>> Okay. >> So
give that a second, it's taking a second to connect in here,
there we go, so we see here, >> I have a storage account called
azsearchrealestate.
And I'm logging up to 120 days of search queries.
>> Okay.
>> As well as all the metrics for the 120 days.
And so that's what I'm going to connect to.
And by the way, if anyone actually wants to give this a try,
I've made this storage account publically accessible.
So you can just put in 120 days with the data, you can put,
easy search real estate.
Hopefully I typed that right.
And if it was a private one, it would ask me for
my credentials to actually allow Power BI to connect into it.
Since it's public it's just going to go in, connect,
start importing all that historical data.
And we have some pretty nice dashboards that allow you to
visualize what's happening and going to a lot of the data.
We'll give this another second to load up.
And what we'll see in this is, not only things like what are the most
common searched search requests that are coming in.
>> Yeah. >> But also,
probably even more importantly, what are people searching for but
not finding results.
>> Right. >> Not getting any data. Okay.
>> So, see if this comes up here.
So what we were talking about is this idea that if we can see here
what people are searching for, here are the most common search queries.
What you'll notice here in the search results, there is,
if we look into this, there's something called hashizaki,
which I don't know what that is, but let's find it out.
If we type in hashizaki and see what comes up here.
So this is some sort of highend appliance.
So apparently what happens is when people search for
real estate they'll not only search for addresses, locations.
But they'll look for attributes for that real estate site.
So In this particular case this person was interested in
a house that had this type of appliance.
But realistically what they probably mean is they really want to have
a home that has a high end appliance in it.
>> Right.
>> So, in fact, if we actually give this a try here.
Now I go back to my postman tool.
>> Okay. >> This is nice for
being able to do search queries.
I can search for everything.
I can search for homes in Seattle.
>> Yeah.
>> I can do this.
pull zachy.
Here, as you can see, this is what we expected, there's no results. Right?
>> Okay.
>> So how do we fix this?
So what I'm going to do is to create something like the Synonym Math.
And this is really a dictionary
of different words that we can say that if somebody types in this word.
Here are the different variations to it, if you see these different
variations in it, that's a good result.
>> So you can see here I have a synonym map called
realestate-synonyms.
And I'm gonna add in not only this word but
a number of other different highend appliances that can all map to
the word highend appliance in there.
So I can create that synonym map.
So now the Azure search service has that dictionary.
And you can keep updating it.
You can keep loading in more synonyms-
>> So as you learn about There's new
high end appliances or you learn more about
the differences you can come in and modify your synonym.
>> Exactly, and that's why this page right here is so
handy because I can keep refreshing it.
Every once in a while.
>> Check for what are the common search terms and
it could be changing.
You can just see what's new and then come back and update that.
So I've created the synonym map and
all I need to do is link it to a specific field.
So for example if I get my index here,
I can just get the schema of the index.
And by the way this is a preview feature, so
all of this has to be done today through the API we haven't brought
it into the portal yet >> Okay
>> But you can see here if I go down
to my description field, what I can do is I can create this synonym
map right here and refer to it by name right here.
So whenever I send that in and create the,
apply that, now when I start doing searches using that word,
we're gong to get the vital results that come back from this.
So now when I type in this word,
we can see that somewhere in here stainless steel or high end, any of
those mattress are gonna comment >> So you can see how we start
tuning this more and more using this very simple tool.
>> That is awesome.
>> Thanks.
>> So right now you have to do this through the APIs?
>> That's right. >> But pretty soon you'll be able to
do all this mapping and things right though the portal?
>> Yeah, that's the idea.
So, the preview API is kinda our experimental platform,
where we can put it with these new features and
allow the customers to give them a try, give us feedback.
And then as we have it solid, we can move it into the official API,
and allow you to then use it in the portal.
>> So did this come about because you had a lot of
people going, you know what?
I'm not getting a lot of results from my searches,
even though Azure search is awesome, we're not getting.
I'm typing this, I'm looking for x but I'm not getting any results.
>> Yeah, that's, it's exactly right.
There's all kinds of different ways that people look at getting relevant results
>> We had done things like
the handling the spelling mistakes, doing phonetic search so
words that sound similar.
But something like this is just a different variation and
we see it across every different industry.
Think about in the medical field,
think about all the different variations for drug names.
>> Right. >> That there are,
that they want and it's very specific to their industry so
they need to provide their own dictionary,
put it in >> So
yeah this has been one of the top, Wes, and
so I'm happy to finally have this- >> This, yeah this is great, and I
think this'll make just the service better, across services, right?
>> Yeah agreed.
>> Cool, awesome.
>> Thanks very much >> All right Liam,
thanks for coming,
we look forward to having you back to talk about other cool stuff that
you guys are thinking of creating over there.
Hey thanks for watching everybody, and we'll see you next time
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