Amazon introduces search as a service to handle data needs

One of the thorniest issues plaguing companies with ever-growing datasets is handling search. Amazon Web Services (AWS) has introduced a new service to try to meet some of the demands of companies looking to deal with this problem.

The company has launched Amazon CloudSearch, claiming that it will offer organisations to implement search for applications quickly and easily.

The company said that the software, based on A9 technology (the same used on Amazon’s own website), automatically provisioned the technology needed to implement search, as long as developers had created a search and uploaded the searchable data.

The key advantages for customers are the degree of scalability and the ability to pay according to needs. AWS claimed that Amazon CloudSearch  would seamlessly scale as the amount of searchable data increases. The company said businesses couldchange search parameters, fine tune search relevance and apply new settings at any time without having to upload the data again. The software is offered on a pay-as-you-go basis with no upfront costs and no long-term commitment.

One of Amazon’s beta customers for the service said that the use of CloudSearch had enabled its site to operate without collapsing under the weight of queries. “Historically, it has been a challenge to provide our customers with a fast search experience that can scale on top of this always growing dataset,” said Lucas Hrabovsky, CTO, of  ex.fm, a  music website, that handles hundreds of thousands of new song links a  day.

“With a small team of engineers, we can't afford to dedicate resources to manage our search infrastructure. Amazon CloudSearch takes care of everything for us – it scales beautifully and is consistently fast. And our customers have noticed. Since deploying CloudSearch in production, we’ve received very positive feedback from customers about our search speed and accuracy,” added Hrabovsky.