AWS CloudSearch is a hosted search service designed to allow you to quickly integrate a search service that is simple to scale when required and provides near real-time indexing of document updates.=
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Pros
Pro Easy to Integrate and Manage
The primary differentiator of CloudSearch is how simple it makes the lives of the developers using it. Not only does it automatically scale, developers can change search parameters, fine tune search relevance, and apply new settings at any time without having to upload the data again and can do so from a simple dashboard.
CloudSearch also automatically takes care of:
- Hardware provisioning
- Data partitioning,
- Software patches.
Pro Scalability
CloudSearch dynamically scales as the amount of searchable data increases or as the query rate changes. The search system utilizes well-understood and automated sharding and replication to scale.
CloudSearch will automatically add search instances and index partitions as required as well as add and remove replicas to respond to changes in search request traffic.
Pro Search features
CloudSearch lets you add the the following features:
- Faceted search
- Free text search
- Boolean search expressions
- Customized relevance ranking
- Field-based sorting and searching
- Text processing options such as stopwords, synonyms, and stemming.
Pro Results Ranking
CloudSearch does out-of-the-box ranking of search results with simple controls to let developers tweak the ranking. You can add stopwords, perform stemming, and add synonyms.
Cons
Con Propriety Tech
While ElasticSearch and Solr both have active open-source communities propelling the technology forward, CloudSearch is closed. This has multiple disadvantages such as:
- Constrained by what Amazon allows you to modify/customize.
- No transparency behind new feature development.
- Potentially slower development of new features.
- No way to modify/extend the search algorithms.
- No existing language specific API to call the Cloudsearch and process the response into objects.
Con No Geolocation search
No way to sort and filter by distance.
Con No 'More like this'
CloudSearch doesn't support the 'More like this' or 'Find similar' features.
Con No AutoComplete/Suggest
Does not have the functionality to either autocomplete the users search query or suggest an alternative query ("Did you mean?").
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