[April 12, 2012]

Amazon Web Services Launches Amazon CloudSearch

Amazon Web Services (News - Alert) LLC (AWS), an Amazon.com company (NASDAQ:AMZN), today introduced Amazon CloudSearch, a new service that allows customers to easily integrate a fast, fully managed and highly scalable search functionality into their applications. Developers simply create a search domain, upload the data they want searchable, and Amazon CloudSearch automatically provisions the technology resources required and deploys the highly tuned search indexes needed - as simple as that, the search functionality is up and running. Amazon CloudSearch seamlessly 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. Amazon CloudSearch offers low, pay-as-you-go pricing with no up-front expenses or long-term commitments. To get started with Amazon CloudSearch, visit http://aws.amazon.com/cloudsearch.

Prior to today, building robust search capability required dedicated engineering teams who would spend weeks, or even months, provisioning, configuring and deploying costly search infrastructure and software. On top of that, companies had to hire search specialists to constantly monitor, manage and adjust the search solution as traffic volumes change. With Amazon CloudSearch, customers can now quickly make any data set searchable without the additional cost and complexity of managing and scaling their own search engine.

Amazon CloudSearch leverages the same A9 technology that powers search for Amazon.com (News - Alert) and provides businesses with high throughput and low latency so they can deliver a fast search experience to their customers. 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 and easy to use as the service automatically detects and recommends the ideal search fields from a sample data set. Settings can also be easily customized from the AWS Management Console.

ex.fm is a social music discovery platform offering a large collection of free, legal music on the web. "Each day, ex.fm users add more than a hundred thousand new song links to the platform. Historically, it has been a challenge to provide our customers with a fast search experience that can scale on top of this always growing dataset," said Lucas Hrabovsky, CTO, ex.fm. "With a small team of engineers, we can't afford to dedicate resources to manage our search infrastructure. Amazon CloudSearch takes care of everything for us - it scales beautifully and is consistently fast. And our customers have noticed. Since deploying CloudSearch in production, we've received very positive feedback from customers about our search speed and accuracy."

Sage Bionetworks is a nonprofit biomedical research organization. "We have integrated Amazon CloudSearch in Synapse, our informatics platform for collaborative biological research that will serve as a public resource for the scientific community," said Michael Kellen, Ph.D., Director of Technology and Software Development at Sage Bionetworks. "The search service built by CloudSearch will help scientists find and use relevant data from a broad set of scientific resources. We have been impressed with the power and flexiblity of CloudSearch, and how quickly we were able to use it to get a new search system up and running - we had CloudSearch instances functional in less than an hour and fully integrated with our application and deployed to our users in less than a month."

"For many organizations, search plays a major role in how their customers experience their product or service - businesses need a sophisticated search capability to help their customers find the right information quickly. Implementing rich search functionality has traditionally been very expensive and time consuming due to the complexity of the technology required," said Adam Selipsky, Vice President, Amazon Web Services. "Amazon CloudSearch frees customers from worrying about all of these complexities so they can easily launch powerful search functionality and pay only for the resources they use."

About Amazon Web Services

Launched in 2006, Amazon Web Services (AWS) began exposing key infrastructure services to businesses in the form of web services -- now widely known as cloud computing. The ultimate benefit of cloud computing, and AWS, is the ability to leverage a new business model and turn capital infrastructure expenses into variable costs. Businesses no longer need to plan and procure servers and other IT resources weeks or months in advance. Using AWS, businesses can take advantage of Amazon's expertise and economies of scale to access resources when their business needs them, delivering results faster and at a lower cost. Today, Amazon Web Services provides a highly reliable, scalable, low-cost infrastructure platform in the cloud that powers hundreds of thousands of enterprise, government and startup customers businesses in 190 countries around the world. AWS offers over 28 different services, including Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) and Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS). AWS services are available to customers from data center locations in the U.S., Brazil, Europe, Japan and Singapore.

About Amazon.com

Amazon.com, Inc. (NASDAQ: AMZN), a Fortune 500 company based in Seattle, opened on the World Wide Web in July 1995 and today offers Earth's Biggest Selection. Amazon.com, Inc. seeks to be Earth's most customer-centric company, where customers can find and discover anything they might want to buy online, and endeavors to offer its customers the lowest possible prices. Amazon.com and other sellers offer millions of unique new, refurbished and used items in categories such as Books; Movies, Music & Games; Digital Downloads; Electronics & Computers; Home & Garden; Toys, Kids & Baby; Grocery; Apparel, Shoes & Jewelry; Health & Beauty; Sports & Outdoors; and Tools, Auto & Industrial. Amazon Web Services provides Amazon's developer customers with access to in-the-cloud infrastructure services based on Amazon's own back-end technology platform, which developers can use to enable virtually any type of business. The new latest generation Kindle is the lightest, most compact Kindle ever and features the same 6-inch, most advanced electronic ink display that reads like real paper even in bright sunlight. Kindle Touch is a new addition to the Kindle family with an easy-to-use touch screen that makes it easier than ever to turn pages, search, shop, and take notes - still with all the benefits of the most advanced electronic ink display. Kindle Touch 3G is the top of the line e-reader and offers the same new design and features of Kindle Touch, with the unparalleled added convenience of free 3G. Kindle Fire is the Kindle for movies, TV shows, music, books, magazines, apps, games and web browsing with all the content, free storage in the Amazon Cloud, Whispersync, Amazon Silk (Amazon's new revolutionary cloud-accelerated web browser), vibrant color touch screen, and powerful dual-core processor.

Amazon and its affiliates operate websites, including www.amazon.com, www.amazon.co.uk, www.amazon.de, www.amazon.co.jp, www.amazon.fr, www.amazon.ca, www.amazon.cn, www.amazon.it, and www.amazon.es. As used herein, "Amazon.com," "we," "our" and similar terms include Amazon.com, Inc., and its subsidiaries, unless the context indicates otherwise.

Forward-Looking Statements

This announcement contains forward-looking statements within the meaning of Section 27A of the Securities Act of 1933 and Section 21E of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934. Actual results may differ significantly from management's expectations. These forward-looking statements involve risks and uncertainties that include, among others, risks related to competition, management of growth, new products, services and technologies, potential fluctuations in operating results, international expansion, outcomes of legal proceedings and claims, fulfillment center optimization, seasonality, commercial agreements, acquisitions and strategic transactions, foreign exchange rates, system interruption, inventory, government regulation and taxation, payments and fraud. More information about factors that potentially could affect Amazon.com's financial results is included in Amazon.com's filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission, including its most recent Annual Report on Form 10-K and subsequent filings.

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