Amazon to Launch Cloud Search Service, Possibly Tomorrow | Hacker News Reader

Amazon to Launch Cloud Search Service, Possibly Tomorrow

pandodaily.com

99 pointsredditmigrant25 comments

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.

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

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.

I'm currently evaluating which architecture is better for my startup project: I'm thinkin about hosting my own Solr instance (i've already used it in a Drupal project), using an external hosted Solr solution, using another engine (i.e. i discovered basex.org - anyone has used it? my data will be 90% XML) or something else. Probably I'll have to add this to the list...

edit: I didnt consider IndexTank but it seems interesting, I have just to understand if it's a good solution if you dont need social inputs

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)./

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?

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.

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

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

You, sir, have a good source!

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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://tech.fortune.cnn.com/2012/01/02/bloggers-vs-pros-on-a...

Tech stock. Singular. AAPL.

I think it's possible that a full-time analyst understands less than someone who practices. Your comment in general smells of the EMH.

My point is only that any given nonexpert very rarely outperforms an expert in any field. If you are a nonexpert you should always temper your beliefs; if you thought of it then why haven't the experts? Sometimes they will have thought of it but not executed for some reason, but something that seems simple and obvious usually seems that way because it actually is.

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

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).

Yes, no attempt to hide that

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...

way to bury the lede

http://imgur.com/y9c84

Reply on news.ycombinator.com