Azure Cognitive Search x Virto Commerce
B2B enterprises already running on Microsoft Azure often want their search engine to live in the same cloud environment as the rest of their infrastructure. Azure Cognitive Search provides that as a fully managed cloud search service, and Virto Commerce includes a native module that connects it directly to Virto’s core search architecture.
About Azure Cognitive Search
Azure Cognitive Search is a fully managed cloud search service from Microsoft Azure, letting businesses build search capabilities into applications without managing their own search infrastructure. It includes built-in AI enrichment — capabilities like key phrase extraction and entity recognition — that can pull additional searchable metadata out of unstructured content such as documents and product descriptions.
How Virto Integrates with Azure Cognitive Search
Virto Commerce includes a native Azure Cognitive Search module that implements Virto’s ISearchProvider interface, the same core abstraction used by Elasticsearch and Algolia. This means Azure Search plugs directly into Virto’s existing search architecture rather than running as a separate, parallel system, and Virto’s Search module routes indexing and query calls to Azure Search once it’s configured as the active provider.
The integration covers:
- Indexed search across products, categories, and other document types routed through Virto’s Search module to Azure Cognitive Search
- Fuzzy search support for queries with typos or misspellings
- Full rebuild and incremental indexing, triggered manually or through scheduled jobs
- Optional AI enrichment skills for extracting additional searchable metadata from product content
The module supports fuzzy search — queries that tolerate typos and misspellings — either set automatically per search request or configured manually in the query syntax. Configuration is handled through a small set of settings: the Azure search service name, an access key, and a scope prefix used for index naming, since each document type is stored in its own index.
Implementation Approach
Virto Commerce integrates with enterprise systems through a combination of APIs, middleware, and integration accelerators — designed to reduce implementation effort while preserving the flexibility that enterprise-specific workflows require.
Key considerations: existing Azure infrastructure and whether search should live alongside it, catalog size and indexing frequency, whether AI enrichment skills are needed for unstructured content, and authentication setup using your Azure Search service credentials.
Use Cases
Keeping search infrastructure inside an existing Azure environment
Enterprises that already run on Azure often prefer to keep search there too, rather than introducing a separate vendor and infrastructure footprint. Because Virto’s Azure Search module implements its core search provider interface natively, catalog data indexes directly into Azure Cognitive Search without a separate integration layer.
Search runs inside the same Azure environment as the rest of the business’s infrastructure, simplifying vendor management and operations.
Handling typos and misspelled search terms gracefully
B2B buyers searching technical product names or part numbers often make typing errors. Azure Cognitive Search’s fuzzy search capability, supported natively in Virto’s module, can be set to automatically tolerate those errors and still return relevant results.
Buyers find what they’re looking for even when their search terms aren’t spelled exactly right.
Extracting searchable metadata from unstructured product content
Some B2B catalogs include unstructured content — technical documents, specification sheets — where useful searchable information isn’t in clean, structured fields. Azure’s AI enrichment skills can extract key phrases and metadata from that content as part of the indexing process.
Search becomes more useful by surfacing information buried in documents and descriptions that wouldn’t otherwise be searchable.