zachfier

I'm one of the engineers here at Lightcrest - I have a question for the Y Combinator community. We feel that the current search options for developers, publishers, and store-owners are limited and lacking features. Google eCommerce search is expensive ($25k+/yr) and Google web search is limited in scope, dumps ads, and doesn't provide nice features like typeahead. Google also doesn't provide aggressive indexing - even their new indexing service can take up to 24 hours to index new content. Other services like websolr and indextank have some nice options, but they don't let you go from 0-60 very quickly - you need to code up solutions using client libraries before you can get started, and there is no advanced crawling capabilities. E-commerce search solutions should let you rank and promote items on the fly. And you should have access to this kind of functionality for less than $25k/yr.

Would you use an initially free, eventually pay-as-you-go service that is substantially cheaper than Google's to address the aforementioned needs?