Expanding the Cloud – Introducing Amazon CloudSearch

Google underpriced the services while Amazon leans towards the expensive side and rarely lowers prices, making the services profitable. For example EC2 is very expensive and you usually run on 5yo hardware.

It's Amazon's in-house search stack, related to the A9 project.

I think it's the same as many other services from Amazon. It's the fact that you don't have to maintain it yourself. You use their APIs and it works. I don't know if you've ever tried to setup a search engine yourself but it can be a relative pain in the ass, especially if you want to do it at a large scale.

This service provides a search engine that gets you up and going very fast, especially if you don't know how to do it. I haven't tried it yet but if it saves me time and it's relatively full featured, then I'm going to use it for sure.