Amazon has relaunched search engine in the name of "Cloud search".

[Image:source]

Amazon.com the world's largest retailer has reentered into the search engine market with a new product named it as "Cloud Search". This time they will be selling this technology to anyone who is able to fork out as low as $100 per month for this wonderful technology. It is also scalable according to the demand using Amazon cloud services. More over it is fully managed so that you do not have to spend time in repairing technical glitches in your search engine. I think this is a boon to the booming online retailers specially in India or elsewhere. But these are nothing in comparable with google or bing search engines which are indexing the complete web. But ok for online retailers or ecommerce sites. for them it is a speedy, secure, scalable way while showcasing their product in a managed way.

This can be done by following some simple steps that had been clearly shown by Jeff Barr on the AWS blog. After closing A9 search engine Amazon has used it's technology in developing this search engine and selling it as a pay-as-you go model.

This new application named "Cloud Search" will be delivering search results via XML or JASON format.

Then what about pricing?

Amazon will not be charging any upfront payment or setup fees but will recharging you in pay-as-you go model.  Amazon will be charging monthly fees according to the usage on following four dimensions. 

• Search Instances
• Document batch uploads
• Index documents request
• Data transfer

Amazon is offering three type of search instances

• Small Search Instances costs $0.12 per hour basis.
• large Search Instances costs $0.48 per hour basis.
• Extra Large Search Instances costs $0.68 per hour basis.

As it a managed one so Amazon scales up and down the search domain according to the demand.

Batch Uploads

It is billed according to the total number of batches uploaded to the search domain and the uploaded documents are automatically indexed. It is charged $0.10 per 1,000 Batch Upload Requests (the maximum size for each batch is 5 MB)

Index documents request

For rebuilding the instance or any configurational changes to do this AWS Management Console, command line tools, or APIs to issue an IndexDocuments request are required. For which Amazon charges $0.98 per GB of data stored in the Search Domain. But to add data to the Search Domain which requires to rebuild the index to give better search result Amazon charges nothing.

Data Transfer

Amazon charges for the out bound traffic and Data transferred between Amazon CloudSearch and Amazon EC2 instances in the same region is fee but elsewhere costs $0.120/GB for first 10TB and then upto 50GB $0.090/GB and then $0.070/GB for greater . 

It may be looking very simple but the pricing is complex because of Amazon's calculation.

* in various parts of this posts we have used the word "Search Domain" which actually the name of the domain which you will have to create while setting up the "cloud search".

Here is the Video of How to build a cloud search for your site ?