Feeling for the guys who started IndexTank replacements and other Search-aaS companies. Infrastructure is a poor place to be with AWS around. Just a matter of time until they offer every low level service.
They can have one advantage over AWS: customer service. That's what made IndexTank, we would have never made it as user-friendly without our close relationship with our users.
I can definitely attest to IndexTank's fantastic customer service making a difference. We used the service for our startup. I remember dealing with Ignacio. Not only did he take the time to help us when we were using the free service, he took the time to look at our site (and give us a much needed ego boost by calling it a good idea). He took the time to understand the idea and figure out just what we needed. That is not going to happen with AWS...
Absolutely agreed. My cofounder and I have real conversations with real websolr customers every day, who are thrilled to have access to search experts.
Not just customer service, too, but end to end developer experience can be a huge advantage. I'm personally very active in maintaining the popular Sunspot Ruby library for Solr, and have passing familiarity with the internals of half a dozen other clients as well. This makes for improvements at all levels of the stack.
While the CloudSearch API looks a bit more reasonable than the recently released DynamoDB, Amazon has traditionally been somewhat poor in terms of end-to-end developer experience.
Thanks, but don't pity us! I knew about amazon cloud search before I decided to start working on Searchify. I said it before and I'll say it again - any worthwhile space will have competitors. And I think today has already set the record for new signups on Searchify.
And "near-real-time" amazon, is that all you got? :)
