Amazon wants to empower companies to google without Google: With Amazon CloudSearch, which allows developers to create a search domain, upload the searchable data, and CloudSearch will do the rest. “As simple as that, the search functionality is up and running,” Amazon said.
Now embarked on thwarting the dominance of world’s online search giant Google, it now seems that CloudSearch wants to snatch some of Google’s thunder in internal site search. Most likely, Amazon wants its AWS customers to adopt this tool for customized searches on their sites, and not Google or Bing.
(Credit: Amazon)
Launched in beta mode, Amazon CloudSearch offers a full-fledge way to incorporate search into websites and applications, whether they are customer-facing or for use behind the corporate firewall. Amazon makes setting up and managing CloudSearch easy by making it accessible through the AWS Management Console and offering CloudSearch APIs.
The technology is pretty similar to that is available at Amazon.com, which aims to simplify the process for web developer who wish to integrate search into their ASW-hosted sites. It is a significant development because so many e-commerce websites have poor search capabilities and lose potential sales as a result.
“For many organizations, search plays a significant role in how their customers experience their product or service–businesses need a sophisticated search capability to help their customers find the right information quickly. Implementing rich search functionality has traditionally been very expensive and time consuming due to the complexity of the technology required,” said AWS BVP Adam Selipsky, in a statement. “Amazon CloudSearch frees customers from worrying about all of these complexities so they can easily launch powerful search functionality and pay only for the resources they use.”
Like other cloud-based services, CloudSearch is also scalable, so it can expand as the amount of data increases. Businesses can modify their search criteria, fine tune search relevance, and apply new settings as they go along. Amazon will offer pay-as-you-go or long-term payments options.
In fact, Amazon’s description certainly promotes CloudSearch as something relatively quick and simple, and not too pricey.
“You will be charged based on the number of running search instances. There are three search instance sizes (Small, Large, and Extra Large) at prices ranging from $0.12 to $0.68 per hour (these are US East Region prices, since that is where we are launching CloudSearch),” Amazon Web Service Evangelist Jeff Barr wrote in a blog post. “There is a modest charge for each batch of uploaded data. If you change configuration options and need to re-index your data, you will be billed $0.98 for each Gigabyte of data in the search domain.”
Similar to many cloud-based services, the costs vary based on the amount of traffic, data, and monthly usage. Amazon has fully detailed its pricing scheme via a dedicated Web page, but one typical example estimated the monthly cost at just under $87.
Besides the pricing, the company also explained that “CloudSearch hides all of the complexity and all of the search infrastructure from you. You simply provide it with a set of documents and decide how you would like to incorporate search into your application.”
Interested developers can grab more by signing up for an online webinar scheduled for May 10.
The video below demonstrates ‘How CloudSearch Works’:
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