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Azure Search vs Google Maps: What are the differences?
What is Azure Search? Search-as-a-service for web and mobile app development. Azure Search makes it easy to add powerful and sophisticated search capabilities to your website or application. Quickly and easily tune search results and construct rich, fine-tuned ranking models to tie search results to business goals. Reliable throughput and storage provide fast search indexing and querying to support time-sensitive search scenarios.
What is Google Maps? Build highly customisable maps with your own content and imagery. Create rich applications and stunning visualisations of your data, leveraging the comprehensiveness, accuracy, and usability of Google Maps and a modern web platform that scales as you grow.
Azure Search belongs to "Search as a Service" category of the tech stack, while Google Maps can be primarily classified under "Mapping APIs".
Some of the features offered by Azure Search are:
- Powerful, reliable performance
- Easily tune search indices to meet business goals
- Scale out simply
On the other hand, Google Maps provides the following key features:
- Maps Image APIs
- Places API
- Web Services
"Easy to set up" is the primary reason why developers consider Azure Search over the competitors, whereas "Free" was stated as the key factor in picking Google Maps.
From a StackShare Community member: "We're a team of two starting to write a mobile app. The app will heavily rely on maps and this is where my partner and I are not seeing eye-to-eye. I would like to go with an open source solution like OpenStreetMap that is used by Apple & Foursquare. He would like to go with Google Maps since more apps use it and has better support (according to him). Mapbox is also an option but I don’t know much about it."

Google Maps is best because it is practically free (they give you $300 in free credits per month and it's really hard to go over the free tier unless you really mean business) and it's the best!

I use OpenStreetMap because that has a strong community. It takes some time to catch up with Google Maps, but OpenStreetMap will become great solution.

I use Google Maps because it has a lot of great features such as Google's rich APIs, geolocation functions, navigation search feature, street map view, auto-generated 3D city map.

I use OpenStreetMap because i have the control of the environment, using Docker containers or bare-metal servers.
Pros of Azure Search
- Easy to set up4
- Auto-Scaling3
- Managed3
- Easy Setup2
- More languages2
- Lucene based search criteria2
Pros of Google Maps
- Free253
- Address input through maps api136
- Sharable Directions81
- Google Earth47
- Unique45
- Custom maps designing3
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Cons of Azure Search
Cons of Google Maps
- Google Attributions and logo4
- Only map allowed alongside google place autocomplete1