14 DAY TRIAL // Amazon is adding another product to the Web Services rooster, CloudSearch. The name leaves no room for interpretation, it's a search service powered by the cloud. It's designed for websites and apps that want to add search functionality that scales well relatively easy.
"Amazon CloudSearch is a fully-managed search service in the cloud that allows customers to easily integrate fast and highly scalable search functionality into their applications," Amazon wrote.
"With a few clicks in the AWS Management Console, developers simply create a search domain, upload the data they want to make searchable to Amazon CloudSearch, and the service then automatically provisions the technology resources required and deploys a highly tuned search index," it announced.
Being a search engine at heart, CloudSearch can't escape the comparison to Google and it's easy to say that Amazon is now taking on Google's bread and butter. But it's not quite so since CloudSearch is not a generalist search engine, it's a search service offered to third-parties.
However, there is one Google product that CloudSearch is targeting - the hosted search options Google offers to websites dubbed Custom Search.
"Amazon CloudSearch enables customers to offload the administrative burden of operating and scaling a search platform. Customers don't have to worry about hardware provisioning, data partitioning, or software patches," Amazon boasted.
Then again, that's true for any cloud service and it's true for Google's search offering as well. And Google is not the only one offering a turnkey search engine; Yahoo BOSS, now powered by Bing, offers pretty much the same thing.
The differentiator will be the price, but, as with any cloud service, this varies greatly depending on the size and scope of the project. Amazon's CloudSearch is labeled as a beta for now, but you can already sign up for it.