Amazon CloudSearch – Start Searching in One Hour for Less Than $100 / Month
Jeff Barr, AWS Evangelist, has the easiest job on the Net! How hard can it be to bring “good news” (the original meaning of evangelist) when it just pours out from AWS. If you are an Amazon veep or some such, be assured that managing that much good news is hard. What do you say first?
From the post:
Continuing along in our quest to give you the tools that you need to build ridiculously powerful web sites and applications in no time flat at the lowest possible cost, I’d like to introduce you to Amazon CloudSearch. If you have ever searched Amazon.com, you’ve already used the technology that underlies CloudSearch. You can now have a very powerful and scalable search system (indexing and retrieval) up and running in less than an hour.
You, sitting in your corporate cubicle, your coffee shop, or your dorm room, now have access to search technology at a very affordable price. You can start to take advantage of many years of Amazon R&D in the search space for just $0.12 per hour (I’ll talk about pricing in depth later).
What is Search?
Search plays a major role in many web sites and other types of online applications. The basic model is seemingly simple. Think of your set of documents or your data collection as a book or a catalog, composed of a number of pages. You know that you can find the desired content quickly and efficiently by simply consulting the index.
Search does the same thing by indexing each document in a way that facilitates rapid retrieval. You enter some terms into a search box and the site responds (rather quickly if you use CloudSearch) with a list of pages that match the search terms.
My only quibble with the announcement is that it makes search sound too easy. Jeff does mention all the complex things you can do but a casual reader is left with the impression that search isn’t all that hard.
Well, I suppose search isn’t that hard but good searching is. Some very large concerns that have made mediocre searching a real cash cow.
That model, the mediocre searching model, may not work for you. In that case, you can still use Amazon CloudSearch but you had best get some expert searching advice to go along with it.