Amazon is making a fully-managed search service available that you can include in your applications to give your users a scaleable search mechanism without you having to manage the search engine.

Amazon CloudSearch lets you offer free text search, faceted search, customizable relevance ranking, and configurable search fields.

Faceted searches let you categorise the results of one search into sub-groups, which can be used as the basis for another search. CloudSearch also provides text processing options, and is designed to give near real-time indexing.

The technology is the same that powers searches on Amazon, and the costs work out at $100 a month.

There’s also a video showing how to get started:

and a demo on building a search application:

In order to use the new service you need to create and configure a Search Domain, (a data container and a related set of services). You then upload the documents you want your users to be able to search, in either JSON or XML formats that conform to Amazon’s Search Document Format (SDF).

Data can be sent over a secure HTTPS connection to protect it while it is transit. Documents that are added become searchable more or less immediately, and the search index is stored in RAM to ensure document updates are indexed at once.

You can include CloudSearch in your apps via a set of Amazon CloudSearch APIs (see this documentation) and There’s also a helpful blog post about the search by Jeff Barr.

More Information

Amazon CloudSearch (beta)

Amazon Web Services blog

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