1. Argus Media & CloudSearch
Chris Fosberry, CTO
Argus Media

2. About Argus
•
Leading international and independent price reporting organisation
•
Founded in 1970 — over 40 years experience
•
Today over 120 publications and services
•
Almost 500 employees and 40 freelancers (news journalists)
•
Customers in 110 countries
•
Annual revenues ~£100mn (2013)
•
London HQ. Nineteen offices around the globe
•
One of top 50 fastest growing UK registered companies
(Sunday Times)

3. The problem we had
• Over the past 40 years, Argus has accumulated a wealth of content
including;
• 75,000
• 400,000
• 16,500
Historic publications stored across multiple file systems
News Stories
Commodity prices of which many update daily
• Search was very slow and in some cases results could take over a
minute to appear
• User experience was very basic with no support for faceted search or
synonyms. Often users could not locate what they were looking for
• As new data sources were acquired it was time consuming to make
this content available to Argus customers

4. Why we chose Amazon CloudSearch
• Amazon model allowed a proof of concept to be delivered
quickly
• Amazon has a reputation for releasing new features regularly
• No need to consider infrastructure requirements
• Resilience supported through hosting across multiple
availability zones
• Scaling happens seamlessly as user demand increases
• Pricing model based on usage

5. Implementation Experience
Positives
•
•
•
•
Amazon provided support where
required
Documentation provided is very
good
Implementation against the API was
relatively painless
No stability concerns raised to date
Negative
•
Some search requests would fail
validation checks for unknown
reasons. Whilst the reasons were
valid, the detail returned by the
search service was not always
helpful
Not having to worry about environment construction and
configuration has undoubtedly saved us hundreds of man
hours in systems administration activity

6. Current Status & Business Benefits
•
Amazon CloudSearch is now live
across Argus premium online
channels
•
Customer feedback has been
extremely positive with particular
focus on performance and the use
of faceted search
•
•
The queries that took over a minute to
execute are now sub 1 second
Staff who have access to all content
believe they are working more
efficiently