Yes, A9 was one of the competitors for some of my time at Google, but I'm talking about Amazon basically creating some search engine infrastructure and a framework for building search engines on top of. Selling shovels to the gold miners, in a sense.
The crawling and initial indexing stages need a lot of scaling and performance tuning work, which is a core competency for the AWS engineers. Furthermore, essentially zero people say "I want to build a startup around my new crawl scheduling idea, but it's too time consuming and expensive to write the rest of the search engine." Many more people say "I have a new idea for ranking" or "I have a new idea for content extraction, but it's too expensive and time-consuming to write the rest of a search engine".
Google and Bing already expose "custom search engines" which are basically just filters on top of their search engines. I'm talking about something similar, but much deeper customization.
Also, I was at Goldman when Google Search Appliance was EoL'd. GS had plenty of internal content that needed to be indexed, absolutely needed to be kept private, and wasn't well indexed by any of the replacements GS evaluated. For companies that keep lots of documents in AWS storage, it would be good to open up the space for Google Search Appliance replacements. Amazon could write their own, but given that Google abandoned the space, the profit margins aren't great for a huge company. However, creating a search ecosystem within the AWS ecosystem makes the AWS ecosystem more attractive. Maybe forgoing the search profits and inviting in search providers would be a net win in selling more AWS compute and storage.
The crawling and initial indexing stages need a lot of scaling and performance tuning work, which is a core competency for the AWS engineers. Furthermore, essentially zero people say "I want to build a startup around my new crawl scheduling idea, but it's too time consuming and expensive to write the rest of the search engine." Many more people say "I have a new idea for ranking" or "I have a new idea for content extraction, but it's too expensive and time-consuming to write the rest of a search engine".
Google and Bing already expose "custom search engines" which are basically just filters on top of their search engines. I'm talking about something similar, but much deeper customization.
Also, I was at Goldman when Google Search Appliance was EoL'd. GS had plenty of internal content that needed to be indexed, absolutely needed to be kept private, and wasn't well indexed by any of the replacements GS evaluated. For companies that keep lots of documents in AWS storage, it would be good to open up the space for Google Search Appliance replacements. Amazon could write their own, but given that Google abandoned the space, the profit margins aren't great for a huge company. However, creating a search ecosystem within the AWS ecosystem makes the AWS ecosystem more attractive. Maybe forgoing the search profits and inviting in search providers would be a net win in selling more AWS compute and storage.