Amazon has tried a variety of different projects in search over the years, with its A9 search engine never becoming a major rival to the bigger players in the broader world of web search.
But the Seattle company is still in the search game, and this morning its Amazon Web Services unit rolled out a beta of a new service for websites and apps that aims to capitalize on its years of work in search technology.
It’s called CloudSearch, and the company says it will let developers integrate a “powerful and scalable search system” for indexing and retrieving information in their sites and apps. The setup takes less than an hour and costs less than $100 a month, the company says.
CloudSearch will compete with services from Google, Microsoft and others.
Several Amazon Web Services Customers have been testing the technology. Among them: A company called Search Technologies created a Wikipedia search application, NewsRight is using it for a news search tool, and SmugMug is using it for photo searching on its site.
Amazon’s Jeff Barr explains and shows the setup process in a blog post.
