Presented at the LA Amazon CloudSearch Meetup by Jon Handler, Amazon CloudSearch Solutions Architect. This talk covers an introduction to CloudSearch as well as new features for ranking, relevance, analytics, and tuning.

1. LA Amazon CloudSearch
Meetup
January 30, 2013
© 2013 Amazon.com, Inc. and its affiliates. All rights reserved. May not be copied, modified or distributed in whole or in part without the express consent of Amazon.com, Inc.

2. Welcome
! Housekeeping
! Slides will be posted
! Forms for drawing
© 2013 Amazon.com, Inc. and its affiliates. All rights reserved. May not be copied, modified or distributed in whole or in part without the express consent of Amazon.com, Inc.

3. Agenda
! CloudSearch Analytics and Visual Relevancy Ranking -
Jon Handler, Amazon CloudSearch
! Using Amazon CloudSearch For Geospatial Search -
Tom Hill, Amazon CloudSearch
! IMDb User Talk - Matt Pearson
! Q&A
© 2013 Amazon.com, Inc. and its affiliates. All rights reserved. May not be copied, modified or distributed in whole or in part without the express consent of Amazon.com, Inc.

4. Amazon CloudSearch: Metrics, and
the Rank Expression Comparator
Jon Handler / handler@amazon.com
© 2013 Amazon.com, Inc. and its affiliates. All rights reserved. May not be copied, modified or distributed in whole or in part without the express consent of Amazon.com, Inc.

5. Amazon CloudSearch Overview
DNS / Load Balancing AWS Query
Search Domain
Search API Console Doc Command Console Config Command Console
Svc API Line Tools API Line Tools
ACCESS CONTROL ACCESS CONTROL ACCESS CONTROL
SEARCH SERVICE DOCUMENT SERVICE CONFIG SERVICE
Search Documents Add Documents Create Domains
Update Documents Configure Domains
Delete Documents Delete Domains
© 2013 Amazon.com, Inc. and its affiliates. All rights reserved. May not be copied, modified or distributed in whole or in part without the express consent of Amazon.com, Inc.

6. Automatic Scaling DATA Document Quantity and Size
SEARCH INSTANCE SEARCH INSTANCE SEARCH INSTANCE
Index Partition 1 Index Partition 2 Index Partition n
Copy 1 Copy 1 Copy 1
TRAFFIC
Search
Request
Volume and SEARCH INSTANCE SEARCH INSTANCE SEARCH INSTANCE
Complexity Index Partition 1 Index Partition 2 Index Partition n
Copy 2 Copy 2 Copy 2
SEARCH INSTANCE SEARCH INSTANCE SEARCH INSTANCE
Index Partition 1 Index Partition 2 Index Partition n
Copy n Copy n Copy n
© 2013 Amazon.com, Inc. and its affiliates. All rights reserved. May not be copied, modified or distributed in whole or in part without the express consent of Amazon.com, Inc.

7. Agenda
! Amazon CloudSearch metrics
• Know what your customers are doing
• Feed forward to improve experience
! Rank expression comparison
• See the effects of changes to ranking
• Tune your results to serve what your customers want
© 2013 Amazon.com, Inc. and its affiliates. All rights reserved. May not be copied, modified or distributed in whole or in part without the express consent of Amazon.com, Inc.

8. AMAZON CLOUDSEARCH
METRICS
© 2013 Amazon.com, Inc. and its affiliates. All rights reserved. May not be copied, modified or distributed in whole or in part without the express consent of Amazon.com, Inc.

9. © 2013 Amazon.com, Inc. and its affiliates. All rights reserved. May not be copied, modified or distributed in whole or in part without the express consent of Amazon.com, Inc.

10. Customer Visibility
! Understand your users’ searches
• Top searches
! Evaluate your ranking and improve it
• No-result searches
• Top documents
! Understand Your Footprint
• Search count
© 2013 Amazon.com, Inc. and its affiliates. All rights reserved. May not be copied, modified or distributed in whole or in part without the express consent of Amazon.com, Inc.

11. Top Searches
Understanding Your Users
© 2013 Amazon.com, Inc. and its affiliates. All rights reserved. May not be copied, modified or distributed in whole or in part without the express consent of Amazon.com, Inc.

12. Top No-Result Searches
© 2013 Amazon.com, Inc. and its affiliates. All rights reserved. May not be copied, modified or distributed in whole or in part without the express consent of Amazon.com, Inc.

13. Top Documents
© 2013 Amazon.com, Inc. and its affiliates. All rights reserved. May not be copied, modified or distributed in whole or in part without the express consent of Amazon.com, Inc.

14. Search Volume
© 2013 Amazon.com, Inc. and its affiliates. All rights reserved. May not be copied, modified or distributed in whole or in part without the express consent of Amazon.com, Inc.

15. RANK EXPRESSION
COMPARISON
© 2013 Amazon.com, Inc. and its affiliates. All rights reserved. May not be copied, modified or distributed in whole or in part without the express consent of Amazon.com, Inc.

16. Benefits of Good Search Results
! User satisfaction means user retention
! Successful searches mean more sales
! Search is central to user experience
© 2013 Amazon.com, Inc. and its affiliates. All rights reserved. May not be copied, modified or distributed in whole or in part without the express consent of Amazon.com, Inc.

17. Good Results Serve User Needs
Shoes
© 2013 Amazon.com, Inc. and its affiliates. All rights reserved. May not be copied, modified or distributed in whole or in part without the express consent of Amazon.com, Inc.

18. Evaluating Relevance
! Relevant – “meets a user’s need in querying the system”
! No right answer!
• “Good” results require human judgment.
! Context matters: scholarly work or stockholder report
• E.g. “president” yields Lee Iococca and Barack Obama
! Help!
© 2013 Amazon.com, Inc. and its affiliates. All rights reserved. May not be copied, modified or distributed in whole or in part without the express consent of Amazon.com, Inc.

19. © 2013 Amazon.com, Inc. and its affiliates. All rights reserved. May not be copied, modified or distributed in whole or in part without the express consent of Amazon.com, Inc.

20. Demo
© 2013 Amazon.com, Inc. and its affiliates. All rights reserved. May not be copied, modified or distributed in whole or in part without the express consent of Amazon.com, Inc.

21. CloudSearch Document
Title
Album (Release)
Artist Name
Artist Terms (Genre)
Artist Familiarity
Artist Hotttnesss
Song Hotttnesss
Year
© 2013 Amazon.com, Inc. and its affiliates. All rights reserved. May not be copied, modified or distributed in whole or in part without the express consent of Amazon.com, Inc.

22. Query Processing
564 726
726 564
Query
123 123
Matching Filtering Ranking Sorting
© 2013 Amazon.com, Inc. and its affiliates. All rights reserved. May not be copied, modified or distributed in whole or in part without the express consent of Amazon.com, Inc.

23. Rank Expressions
! Sources
• text_relevance; UINT fields
! cs.text_relevance()
• Set field weights – default and individual
! Functions
• time, abs, ceil, erf, exp, floor, lgamma, ln, log2, log10, max, min,
sqrt, pow
• Trig functions (including hyperbolic)
© 2013 Amazon.com, Inc. and its affiliates. All rights reserved. May not be copied, modified or distributed in whole or in part without the express consent of Amazon.com, Inc.

24. Demo
© 2013 Amazon.com, Inc. and its affiliates. All rights reserved. May not be copied, modified or distributed in whole or in part without the express consent of Amazon.com, Inc.

25. Tuning
! What to tune
• No-result queries
• Top queries
• Random queries
! User behavior
• Conversion; Clickthroughs
• Logs for full user sessions
© 2013 Amazon.com, Inc. and its affiliates. All rights reserved. May not be copied, modified or distributed in whole or in part without the express consent of Amazon.com, Inc.

26. Recap
! Metrics provide a view into your customers’ behavior
• Top searches – What your customers want
• Zero results – What they can’t find
• Top documents – What they are finding
! Adjust relevance to match customer needs
• Tune rank expressions based on metrics
• “Compare rank expressions” for fast, easy tuning
© 2013 Amazon.com, Inc. and its affiliates. All rights reserved. May not be copied, modified or distributed in whole or in part without the express consent of Amazon.com, Inc.

27. Resources
! Amazon CloudSearch Overview Page
http://aws.amazon.com/cloudsearch/
• FAQs
• Community Forum
• Documentation & Getting Started Tutorial (IMDb)
! Demos and Tutorials
• What Is Amazon CloudSearch
• Introducing Amazon CloudSearch (Features)
• Building a Search Application Using Amazon CloudSearch
• Getting Started Tutorial
© 2013 Amazon.com, Inc. and its affiliates. All rights reserved. May not be copied, modified or distributed in whole or in part without the express consent of Amazon.com, Inc.

28. Upcoming Events
! Bay Area Amazon CloudSearch Group: March 20 –
SOMA Central, San Francisco
! AWS Summit San Francisco, April 30
© 2013 Amazon.com, Inc. and its affiliates. All rights reserved. May not be copied, modified or distributed in whole or in part without the express consent of Amazon.com, Inc.