Amazon CloudSearch is a managed service in the AWS Cloud that makes it simple and cost-effective to set up, manage, and scale a search solution for your website or application. Amazon Cloud Search offers unmatched features that make it the best choice for your business. Some of the features are:
- Free text, Boolean, and Faceted search
- Autocomplete suggestions
- Customizable relevance ranking and query-time rank expressions
- Field weighting
- Geospatial search
- Highlighting
- Support for 34 languages
More content is being uploaded and consumed today than ever before.
And this has an impact on how people look for content. Nowadays, practically every website has a search engine integrated, from little personal blogs to large web shops with hundreds of thousands of items. And for good reason—there is so much online information that users want to quickly and effectively sort through it to discover what they’re looking for.
Unstructured content is often present on smaller, simpler websites when the search engine crawls them. A Search Engine’s job is to sift through this information (documents) and identify the best matches for the website visitor’s search. The items that are most pertinent are listed first.
Amazon CloudSearch
With support for 34 languages, Amazon CloudSearch is concentrated on giving an application that manages a lot of data and great search functionality. It can be used without spending money on setting up, maintenance, or hardware. You don’t need to be an expert in search because it is also quite simple to use.
There are three steps involved in creating a search solution using Amazon CloudSearch: You must first construct and set up your search domain, then upload the data there for Amazon CloudSearch to index and deploy the search index, and finally, search your domain. You can always further modify search parameters to fine-tune the relevancy and edit the settings.
Amazon CloudSearch is capable of indexing and searching both plain text and structured data. It has a lot of features, the most prominent of which are:
- Geospatial search
- Highlighting
- Autocomplete suggestion
- Faceting
- Field weighting
- Term boosting
- Free text, Boolean, and Faceted search
- Sloppy phrase search
- Support for multiple query parsers: simple, structured, lucene, dismax
- Full-text search with language-specific text processing
- Enhanced range searching for all field types
Why should you use it?
Amazon CloudSearch has several benefits over running your own search solution (eg. Elasticsearch or Solr).
Simple
It is easy to build, manage, and administer an Amazon CloudSearch. It may be configured and managed in three different ways: via the AWS management dashboard, the AWS CLI, or the AWS SDKs. Amazon CloudSearch will automatically make recommendations for how to set up your domain’s indexing choices when you point to a sample of your data. Additionally, you can change your search criteria and add or remove index fields.
Scalable
If you run a successful website, it will grow over time, which results in more visitors (query volume) or the need to upload more material more frequently. In any case, Amazon CloudSearch provides robust autoscaling. It will automatically scale your domain’s resources up and down based on volume and traffic fluctuations. If you anticipate a surge in website visitors, you may govern and control that scaling yourself.
Cost-Effective
Amazon CloudSearch is a cost-effective solution. The hourly rates are modest, and the pricing is pay-as-you-go, so you only pay for the resources you utilize (search instances, document batch uploads, index documents requests, and data transfer). There are no long-term contracts or upfront fees. As a result, the overall cost of ownership is quite minimal, especially when compared to the expense of maintaining your own search engine.
Secure
Amazon CloudSearch performs audits using AWS Cloud Trail, supports HTTPS, and interfaces with AWS IAM (Identity and Access Management), which governs access to services, documents, and search. When authenticating users, powerful cryptographic techniques are used to prevent unauthorized access.
Fully Managed
You don’t have to worry about setup and configuration, patching, monitoring, data partitioning, data durability, scaling, or hardware and software provisioning with Amazon CloudSearch. It is an entirely managed AWS service that takes care of everything.
Conclusion
Amazon CloudSearch is a managed AWS Cloud service that adds rich search functionality to your application or website. It has a lot of features such as autocomplete suggestion, highlighting, geospatial search, field weighting, faceting, term boosting, etc. It is very cost-effective, with a pay-as-you-go model and it automatically scales with your website.
If you’re looking for help in applying, we at Rayn have a great team of experts that can help you with designing and implementing a solution that suits your needs and at the same time does not cost you much.
