Amazon Web Services, the b-to-b cloud-based technology platform of Amazon.com, launched CloudSearch, a network designed to help businesses and marketers sift through large amounts of data and information on a cloud platform, the company said in a statement.
“Direct marketing businesses can make their data searchable without the investment in the technology resources that was traditionally required,” said Tera Randall, a public relations specialist at Amazon, in an email.
Amazon added that the service is unique because it can be implemented in less than an hour as it functions on a hosted platform. CloudSearch was designed to allow developers to create search domains and upload data, which the software indexes to enable searching. CloudSearch also, “hides all of the complexity and all of the search infrastructure from you,” wrote Amazon web services evangelist Jeff Barr in a blog post. “You can simply provide it with a set of documents and decide how you would like to incorporate search.”
In the blog post, Barr notes that because data updates are constant, new searches will include newly-added data. CloudSearch has advanced search options, like faceting, which allows for targeting of sub-groups in the data, or fielded search, which allows searching on a specific attribute in a given document.
Prices range from 12 to 68 cents per hour, Barr added, with the total cost likely being fewer than $100 per month.
Companies that have used the technology include ex.fm, a social music platform, and Sage Bionetworks, a nonprofit biomedical research organization.
