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Amazon CloudSearch - Start Searching in One Hour for Less Than $100 / Month

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Re: Amazon CloudSearch - Start Searching in One Hour for Less Than $100 / Month

#62
post #2

You know this doesn't seem like a bad deal though $100/mo might be high for someone just starting out. Right now my options for search are: Full text SQL search Apache Solr or something similar Google Search Appliance Custom search Google free search on your site Yay for search as a service.

Yeah, there's a side project I've been wanting to build for a long time, and it needs search. But the way these prices have been presented, it seems that CloudSearch is just not economically feasible for a SaaS / free multiuser offering.

Solr or Sphinx based searching is what pushed me out of most of the PaaS offerings and into my own VPS. It's unfortunate that most of the hosted services out there are too expensive for side projects.

When I looked at WebSolr, the cost exceeded my entire VPS structure, even for their cheapest plans.

Re: Amazon CloudSearch - Start Searching in One Hour for Less Than $100 / Month

#63
post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And if you want an actually good search product there is always SphinxSearch.

Why the bashing on Elasticsearch? We are using it to index log files; we have over 275 million documents in our index and performance has been pretty impressive.

What kind of hardware are you running that on? We are setting up a larger cluster, and are interested in the config of others. Thnx!

Re: Amazon CloudSearch - Start Searching in One Hour for Less Than $100 / Month

#65
post #4

Feeling for the guys who started IndexTank replacements and other Search-aaS companies. Infrastructure is a poor place to be with AWS around. Just a matter of time until they offer every low level service.

They can have one advantage over AWS: customer service. That's what made IndexTank, we would have never made it as user-friendly without our close relationship with our users.

Re: Amazon CloudSearch - Start Searching in One Hour for Less Than $100 / Month

#66
post #42
post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And if you want a hassle free scalable search service with automatic sharding/scaling, a lucene underpinning and a nice REST API: Elasticsearch

And if you want an actually good search product there is always SphinxSearch.

I always find sphinx limiting. For example, I can add a single doc to the index, I have to run a full re-index.

Also, I can't programmatically get a list of all "words" in the index with their frequency and the inverse dod freq, etc. With anything lucene based this kind of thing is really easy.

Re: Amazon CloudSearch - Start Searching in One Hour for Less Than $100 / Month

#67
post #3

looks like some people would want help in converting document X into a - "JSON or XML that conforms to our Search Document Format (SDF)" This is still going to be a painfull task for legacy data - it has to be massaged into shape. Should be interesting to see how this gets applied though.

I was pretty interested by this announcement as I spent this week setting up elasticsearch, which also uses a JSON interface. However, the main difference to me is that elasticsearch will allow you to use nested documents, which is far less restricting.

Re: Amazon CloudSearch - Start Searching in One Hour for Less Than $100 / Month

#68
post #66
post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And if you want an actually good search product there is always SphinxSearch.

I always find sphinx limiting. For example, I can add a single doc to the index, I have to run a full re-index. Also, I can't programmatically get a list of all "words" in the index with their frequency and the inverse dod freq, etc. With anything lucene based this kind of thing is really easy.

+1 on this. I really liked Sphinx until I started inserting records...

Re: Amazon CloudSearch - Start Searching in One Hour for Less Than $100 / Month

#69
post #16
post #2

You know this doesn't seem like a bad deal though $100/mo might be high for someone just starting out. Right now my options for search are: Full text SQL search Apache Solr or something similar Google Search Appliance Custom search Google free search on your site Yay for search as a service.

There's also: Searchify, Running the full open sourced IndexTank Search as a Service API HoundSleuth, IndexTank Compatible API IndexTanktoGO, IndexTank Compatible API Bimaple, IndexTank Compatible API IndexDen, IndexTank Compatible API

You seem to like IndexTank ;)

There's also my own http://websolr.com/ running Apache Solr. Some other Solr services are mentioned elsewhere on the page.

I've also recently launched http://bonsai.io/ for a hosted ElasticSearch service. Because ElasticSearch is actually quite awesome (and I'm happy to answer questions about why).

For Sphinx, there's Flying Sphinx (by Pat Allen of Thinking Sphinx Ruby client fame, great guy), and IndexDen (which is Sphinx, not IndexTank).

Re: Amazon CloudSearch - Start Searching in One Hour for Less Than $100 / Month

#70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, there's a side project I've been wanting to build for a long time, and it needs search. But the way these prices have been presented, it seems that CloudSearch is just not economically feasible for a SaaS / free multiuser offering.

Solr or Sphinx based searching is what pushed me out of most of the PaaS offerings and into my own VPS. It's unfortunate that most of the hosted services out there are too expensive for side projects. When I looked at WebSolr, the cost exceeded my entire VPS structure, even for their cheapest plans.

We think our prices actually compare pretty well to self-hosting. Hosting a search engine is not cheap when it comes to memory and disk IO, and I don't envy anyone trying to shoehorn production Solr traffic into a small VPS.

Not to mention, we've got transparent replicated redundancy on all our indexes—one of our better-kept secrets, I really need to update our marketing materials—so double your VPSs there.

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