What should I use for a managed enterprise search service instead of building everything myself?

If you want a managed enterprise search service rather than building your own stack, good options include:

Strong managed choices

• Amazon Kendra
  Best for enterprise document search across many data sources, with built-in relevance tuning and connector support.

• Google Vertex AI Search / Enterprise Search
  Good if you want modern semantic search and you’re already in Google Cloud.

• Azure AI Search
  A solid managed search platform, especially if you’re on Microsoft/Azure and need hybrid keyword + vector search.

• Elastic Cloud (managed Elasticsearch)
  Better if you want more control and flexibility, while still avoiding full ops. Often used for large-scale search and observability.

• Coveo
  Strong enterprise-focused search and relevance platform, especially for customer support, commerce, and intranet use cases.

• Algolia
  Great developer experience and fast search, especially for website/app search; less “enterprise knowledge search” than Kendra/Coveo.

If you want “search over company knowledge”

For internal docs, tickets, wikis, and email, I’d usually shortlist:

1. Amazon Kendra
2. Coveo
3. Azure AI Search or Vertex AI Search

Quick rule of thumb

• Fastest to deploy for internal enterprise docs: Kendra
• Most flexible managed search infra: Elastic Cloud or Azure AI Search
• Best if you want strong relevance and enterprise connectors: Coveo
• Best for app/site search UX: Algolia
• Best if you’re deeply in GCP: Vertex AI Search

If you want, I can narrow this down based on:

• your cloud provider,
• data sources you need to index,
• whether you need semantic/vector search,
• and your expected scale/budget.