Amazon Web Services’ CloudSearch service has been upgraded with more search features and is now compatible with 33 languages.
CloudSearch is a fully managed service that lets enterprises focus on adding search functionality to their applications rather than building basic search functionality, scaling it and keeping it online, according to Amazon.
The service was announced in April 2012, and after not doing much to improve CloudSearch last year, Amazon has released “a set of major enhancements,” it said in a blog post.
New search features include auto complete and proximity search, which is a way to search for two or more words that are near each other. There are more field types that can be indexed and searched, as well.
The languages CloudSearch can handle includes simplified Chinese, traditional Chinese, Spanish, Hindi, Arabic, Portuguese, Russian, Japanese, German, French and English, which was the only language when the service was first announced.
Amazon has also integrated CloudSearch with IAM (Identity and Access Management) and improved reliability by letting customers use multiple so-called availability zones, which run on physically independent infrastructures. IAM lets IT departments control who is allowed to create and delete domains, set access policies and indexing options.
CloudSearch is available from Amazon’s data centers in Sydney, Tokyo, and Sao Paulo, in addition to ones in the U.S., Europe and Singapore.
The cost is made up of four different parts: instance type size, document batch uploads, IndexDocuments requests and data transfers. The IndexDocuments requests part relates to the cost of making configuration changes.
Amazon’s cost calculator lets perspective customers check the cost by filling in parameters such as the number of documents, average size of the documents. A search domain that is made up of 25,000 documents with an average size of 15KB would have a basic cost of US$73.20 per month.