[liamca]

ChuckMcM, you are absolutely right. Nailing down QPS rates are an incredibly tough thing. Not just for Azure Search but also for most Search engines that I am aware of. Things like #'s of facets, complexity of queries all play a part in what a search engine can serve up from a QPS rate. When we say ~15QPS we try to point out that this is based on an average index of the ones that we have seen from our typical customers. Certainly some customers may see way more QPS on a single search unit and others will see less.

The main markets (or scenarios) that we target with Azure Search are eCommerce Retail, User Generated Content sites (such as a recipe site or Hacker News) and internal organizational apps. The interesting thing about internal organizational apps is that we are seeing more an more users are finding that search is a natural way to navigate and explore their data. Users are typically far more knowledgeable of using search to explore their data thanks to engines like Google and Bing then then are with say SQL.

We actually don't have an official SLA yet for this preview. That is one of the goals of this public preview which is to really determine what we can realistically promise for our v1 release.

Yes, privacy is a thing for sure. It is interesting that you say lawyers because we have had a number of companies in the law field that have wanted to use Azure Search. Things like indexing of case documents is quite popular from what I have seen. In many of these examples (and also with Helathcare especially), privacy or more specifically encryption at rest as well as compliance (such as HIPPA) often become critical. As of today we don't have either. We don't have encryption at rest and we do not have HIPPA compliance for Azure Search. Of course, this will be a goal and I guess we need to start somewhere. The encryption as it relates to search is actually going to be a really hard thing to do properly so that will be an interesting thing for the future.

By the way, WikiPedia is one of the datasets we often test with our service. Feel free to ping me as we have a loader for the WikiPedia dataset that I could look into sharing with you if would you like to play with it and Azure Search. My email address is my YCombinator username + microsoft.com.

Liam