Amazon Web Services today introduced Amazon CloudSearch, a search service in the cloud that developers can build into their apps.

Developers create a search domain, upload the data they want searchable, and Amazon CloudSearch automatically provisions the technology resources required and deploys the search indexes needed. Amazon CloudSearch scales as the amount of searchable data increases or as the query rate changes, and businesses can change search parameters, fine tune search relevance and apply new settings at any time without having to upload the data again. To get started with Amazon CloudSearch, visit http://aws.amazon.com/cloudsearch.

Amazon CloudSearch leverages the same A9 technology that powers search for Amazon.com. The service provides a rich query language that enables businesses to search within particular fields, perform complex Boolean searches, retrieve facet information, and specify the data included in the search results. Setup and configuration is simple while ettings can also be easily customized from the AWS Management Console.

"You can set it up and start processing queries in less than an hour, with automatic scaling for data and search traffic, all for less than $100 per month," Amazon said in a blog. "CloudSearch hides all of the complexity and all of the search infrastructure from you. You simply provide it with a set of documents and decide how you would like to incorporate search into your application."