New Technology Seeks To Let Startups Build Their Own Googles

location based services

One of the first questions online startups typically face these days from potential investors is "Why couldn't Google build this?" Entrepreneurs are beginning to respond, "Why couldn't we build Google?"
The slow but steady maturation of speed that we did without Nutch and Lucene," says Krugle CEO Steve Larsen. "They were extremely important to us being able to solve the technical problems that we did in a short amount of time."
Access to the code was also important, says CTO Ken Krugler, "so we had the flexibility for the things that we needed for a vertical solution. The commercial solutions are much more restrictive. It's harder to tweak it and form it to what you need."
Krugle maintains about 100 servers at a collocation facility. Krugler says Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) looks promising but Krugler sees it more for companies that are just getting started. EC2 is simply virtual processing power than can be paid for as needed.
"It scales better than doing a co-host setup," says Krugler, though he still considers it too new to rely on. "Technically it ought to scale, but you just don't know."
Search startup Powerset is using EC2 to power its forthcoming natural language search site, apparently without any such reservations.