

Amazon to Launch Cloud Search Service, Possibly Tomorrow - redditmigrant
http://pandodaily.com/2012/01/17/good-news-for-ec2-customers-amazon-may-launch-new-cloud-search-tomorrow/

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staunch
IndexTank sold at a good time. Exactly why I wouldn't consider creating any
kind of infrastructure like this.

I already use nearly all of AWS services, and I'll likely switch from Solr to
whatever this is. They keep doing such a damn good job on features,
reliability, _and_ price.

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mthreat
But as PG says:

"If you make anything good, you're going to have competitors, so you may as
well face that. You can only avoid competition by avoiding good ideas."

\-- <http://www.paulgraham.com/startupmistakes.html>

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acdha
That's only relevant if all you do is search. If you're using a commodity
search engine, as so many people are, an AWS offering lets you shrink the
number of areas which you have to think about so you can focus on your big
ideas.

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chrisacky
I just spent the last week porting over our site from IndexTank to Solr.

I use practically every Amazon computing product already. If it is a Cloud
Search Service, then I hope that it is inferior to running you own Solr stack
in every shape and form. (Because I love Amazon so much I would proabbly start
migrating everything again)./

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bravura
_I just spent the last week porting over our site from IndexTank to Solr._

Do you mind explaining why? Since IndexTank was opensourced, what are the
benefits you found of Solr over IndexTank?

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chrisacky
A few reasons why I've migrated, and I prefix it with saying I've always been
a big fan of IndexTank.

1) I was never interested in running my own Search stack. Now forced with the
need to run IndexTank myself, this benefit was lost.. Seeing as I'd have to
run IndexTank myself

2) Even though it's open source, I doubt that LinkedIn, will be accepting any
pull requests.. I imagine that this is nearly the end of the massive
development drive that has previously gone on. (Purely my own thoughts, I hope
I'm wrong)

3) The faceting with tokenizers is more powerful in Solr. (non existant in
IndexTank)

4) The categorization implementation in IndexTank was a little flawed. ie you
couldn't create "Grouped" fields, that can contain multiple values. To do
this, you had to invert the keys of the values, so that it maps like
"Sony=>manufactuer" for example, where as in Solr, you can create
manufacturer=>[Sony] and have multi value fields, such as
theme=>[thriller,romance] etc.

5) Solr already has a Suggest more like these feature

6) The geo spatial stuff works better in Solr. Especially if you need facets
on geo spatial documents to provide counts back.

7) 4.0 (available in trunk) has real time search. So no index rebuilding.

Don't misunderstand me in saying that IndexTank is poor. IndexTank worked
great, and I reall liked it. Perhaps my application just outgrew the features
that it could offer and Solr became the obvious choice.

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luckyisgood
I predict Amazon's real move is to compete against Google Commerce Search.

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outside1234
I heard they are launching a cassandra-style datastore tomorrow as well.

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mthreat
You, sir, have a good source!

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suprgeek
Great move by Amazon, consolidating its position for all things cloud.
However, I am always disappointed by the search on Amazon's own site. rarely
has it produced the exact thing I am looking for. One hopes that this Search
Service is much (infinitely) better than their current search technology.

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dangrossman
Am I the only one that wishes I were wealthier just so I could invest more in
AMZN?

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esrauch
The thing about that kind of thinking is that if you think it, then it is
almost certainly true that institutional investors think it too, and then the
stock price is already appropriately high.

Amazons PE ratio is something like 100 which is extremely high, Google and
Apple are both in the ~15 range. People are already valuing Amazon much much
higher compared to it's earnings than other major tech stocks.

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bdr
Wouldn't a developer understand the significance of such an announcement
better than an institutional investor?

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esrauch
They have people whose entire job is solely to understand the significance of
announcements like this, if developers understood better then they would just
hire developers. Either that is true, and they hired developers whose entire
job is to evaluate the impact of things like this, or else developers aren't
as good at predicting the effect of announcements like this. It would be
extremely foolish to assume that people wielding literally billions of dollars
are too stupid to ask the right people before deciding how to value something.

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thesethings
I agree with your main point. But it's worth noting an interesting trend is
developing. Amateur analysts are regularly outperforming professional analysts
when it comes to tech stocks. [http://seekingalpha.com/article/315207-apple-
analysts-perpet...](http://seekingalpha.com/article/315207-apple-analysts-
perpetually-clueless) [http://tech.fortune.cnn.com/2012/01/02/bloggers-vs-
pros-on-a...](http://tech.fortune.cnn.com/2012/01/02/bloggers-vs-pros-on-
apples-q1-2012-a-5-billion-gap/)

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wdewind
Tech stock. Singular. AAPL.

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mthreat
Wow I launched my hosted search service, <http://www.searchify.com> at just
the right time!

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ma2rten
You are offering the same API as IndexTank? Is that by any chance, because you
use the same software as IndexTank (it was recently opensourced).

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mthreat
Yes, no attempt to hide that

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mthreat
Asked on Quora a month ago, "Why doesn't Amazon offer a cloud-based search
service?"

[http://www.quora.com/Amazon-Web-Services/Why-doesnt-
Amazon-o...](http://www.quora.com/Amazon-Web-Services/Why-doesnt-Amazon-offer-
a-cloud-based-search-service)

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joshu
way to bury the lede

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shipit
<http://imgur.com/y9c84>

