Amazon Improves Cloudsearch with New Features and Languages

Amazon's Cloudsearch has been updated to include several new useful features and support for 33 languages. Cloudsearch is a unique service that lets enterprises create their own search engines to organize and quickly search through their data and documents without relying on online solutions.

The goal of CloudSearch is to help organizations build search functionality within their applications rather than depending on third-party search services that require internet connectivity.

The service was released more than two years ago and since then not many changes have been implemented. However, that is all set to change now that Amazon has introduced what they've deemed major enhancements with this latest update.

Cloudsearch now supports autocomplete (it is somewhat surprising that this feature was not included initially) and proximity search - a feature that lets you search for text that contains two or more words that are close to each other. 

It is also somewhat surprising that the service was released in only the English language. Some of the new languages that have been added include Spanish, Arabic, Portuguese, Hindi, Russian, German, Chinese, traditional Chinese, and Japanese. The addition of new languages should help Amazon expand their Cloudsearch offerings into foreign markets. 

Aside from the aforementioned improvements, Amazon has also integrated Identity and Access Management (IAM), giving IT departments the ability to create restrictions on who is allowed to set indexing options and access policies.

The reliability of CloudSearch has also been improved with the addition of new "availability zones" that seperate data into different independent infrastructures to create maximum redundancy. This feature should drastically decrease the likelihood of experience an outage or other technical difficulties.

The cost of the CloudSearch service varies depending on the size of the database and how many documents need to be indexed. Given that it is a fully managed service, the cost is based on how much server space and administration will be required.

Amazon provides a cost calculator to help potential customers determine how much their monthly bill will be after disclosing the approximate number of documents and average document size.