Azure search word document hyperlinks

Daniel Jonker 1

Hello everyone,
this post is regarding the Azure search functions.

I have been experimenting with searching through hyperlinks contained in Word documents, which are all stored in the Azure blob storage.
Searching through these hyperlinks would entail Azure digging through the structure of a Word document and finding the hyperlink objects, as that is not what is happening (with the simple search at least) right now.

I have tried to read through the documentation online, but I have not been able to find a way to do this so far, however I assume that it must be possible, since Azure is able to search through metadata of Word documents already, as it is able to reveal the page count (which is something that is stored in a Word document).

My question is:
Is it possible, at all, to search through hyperlink objects in Word using Azure search?
And if so, how is it possible?

Thanks for reading!
Greets, Daniel

ajkuma 26,136 Reputation points Microsoft Employee

2022-08-04T12:29:42.343+00:00

DanielJonker-0525, Thanks for posting the question. While I'm checking on this, could you please share more details about your requirement?

1 answer

ajkuma 26,136 Reputation points Microsoft Employee

2022-08-05T08:45:12.087+00:00

@Daniel Jonker , following-up on this -

Using BM25, in your index definition any searchable field you configure will yield results. For example, if your hyperlink objects are indexed and inside of the response object, then they will be searchable. You may have to do some pre-processing to extract the hyperlinks out of the Word Docs and add these as a separate field in your index and mark it as searchable.

Checkout these docs: Indexes in Azure Cognitive Search
Configure index
Field mappings and transformations using Azure Cognitive Search indexers
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Daniel Jonker 1 Reputation point

2022-08-05T11:34:59.94+00:00

Hi, thanks for reaching out!
The requirements that i am working with is that I have a blob storage containing mainly Word documents, which have hyperlinks in them.
Now, the internal structure of the Word document is that hyperlink objects are indexed in seperate a file inside the .docx document (as a .docx file is basically a zip file)!
Using Azure's search function on these .docx files returns only the text of the hyperlink objects, and not the hyperlink itself (as it is stored seperately inside the .docx file).

Following up on my previous questions (and now me knowing more about what Azure is capable of thanks to your replies), is there an already documented way of extracting more data out of the .docx files?
Or is there a way (an article or MS documentation) that I would be able to do it? I have heard about 'document cracking' before, so maybe the answer I am looking for is in there.

Also a question regarding your reply: is there documentation about how the searchable fields work?

Anyways, thanks so much for the reply already, as it has given me more insight about how I might be able to tackle my problem!

Daniel

ajkuma 26,136 Reputation points Microsoft Employee

2022-08-06T12:22:50.603+00:00

@Daniel Jonker , Thanks for the follow-up. To add more on this -

For "searchable" - Full-text searchable, subject to lexical analysis such as word-breaking during indexing. If you set a searchable field to a value like "sunny day", internally it will be split into the individual tokens "sunny" and "day". For details, see - how full text search works: Full text search in Azure Cognitive Search

If the hyperlink is inside the Word doc and you need to extract and specify key value of URL and value, you may need to pre-process the doc and extract the URL by using Azure Forms Recognizer

Please checkout this document for the steps: Form Recognizer general document model (preview) - If the key pair is not part of the metadata in a Word doc, the search service wouldn't map it in that way.

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Azure search word document hyperlinks

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