tcwc

I can't see this yet, but it looks like Google pull most of the structured info from Freebase (which they acquired in 2010). You can play with that at freebase.com.

This happened a few years ago when Yahoo BOSS started charging, back then Gabriel said they'd moved over to Bing (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1612081).

I'm sure they still make heavy use of the Bing API, but have since expanded their range of sources to soften the blow somewhat. They're now getting results from Blekko (who run their own index), and are I'm sure they've been building out their own index. There's a full list of sources here - http://help.duckduckgo.com/customer/portal/articles/216399-s....

We also don't have any pricing details for higher volume usage of Bing, and DDG are in a much better position to negotiate a better deal these days.

Is this your startup? IIRC summize.com used to be a pretty cool visualization of Amazon reviews... mind me asking what happened to that?

What about their Open Source version - http://www.maxmind.com/app/geolitecountry ?

I haven't started using it yet, but they claim it offers only slightly less accuracy with access to all of their libraries.

Looks amazing. And not a single negative comment on Techcrunch?!

I was just making a comparison of pricing. Not everyone needs a database, and not everyone will be too bothered by the other EC2s drawbacks. For my app the persistent storage issue doesn't matter, and EC2 is good value for a number of other reasons. I agree that for the OP's needs EC2 probably isn't worth bothering with.

Even if used 24/7 is EC2 that bad value wise? Assuming it costs about $70/month for one instance it is a lot cheaper than most dedicated servers. EC2 is a lot more powerful than the average VPS, that is not really a fair comparison. I would say it is pretty good value if you need (almost) 2gb ram and a fast processor.

If Amazon sorts out the other issues EC2 could be really great.

I was at a talk by Jim Buckmaster (CEO) at Edinburgh University earlier this year, he mentioned this. He attributed the lack of staff turnover to the generally relaxed work environment rather than one of these specific reasons. Seems like quite a cool place to work for a programmer, and given only 23 people work there it's not surprising few people leave. Anyway, the video is available here if you are interested, have a look around 8 minutes: mms://granton.ucs.ed.ac.uk/tech-entrepreneur/IE2-06-07/S07JimBuckmaster.wmv (maybe it was the jet lag but he's definitely the most chilled out CEO I have seen!)

I agree with the others re the design. After loading your page it takes a while to work out what the site is actually about. The mass of text is quite confusing, and I think you need to better explain the relationship between "resource" and "sticky". Interested to see you use GWT for this, I know it can be difficult to make anything look good with it. Making the whole site javascript seems to make browsing quite slow, cant you speed it up a bit somehow? just a few thoughts, good luck!