Alexa Web Search Platform

[dyn4mik3]

Amazon just released Alexa Web Search Platform. Basically you can now pay to have access to the Alexa engine - crawler, processing, storage, build your own web service, etc. The cost is fairly small.

More details on my blog and I'm sure tommorow we'll all get the comprehensive review/details here on the SEW blog.

[dyn4mik3]

I just read Danny's review of the service and I think he is missing the point - this isn't just about building your own vertical search engine.

With this service, you can write an application to process all of Alexa's index to return any data you want.

For example:
http://pages.alexa.com/awsp/docs/Web..._Templates.htm

If you want use their index to develop better search algorithms than Google - that would be possible. Or if you want to create your own smaller data collections to process, that is possible too.

Normally you would need hardware/resources/bandwith that a regular developer would not have access to in order to process all that data.

The potential here is what data you can extract from the index - Amazon is saying "here is all the data we have of the internet, we'll give you the resources to process it and store your results, now go do something with it".

[Webvisitor]

Battelle's Searchblog comment section is lit up over this subject.

Hi !

I agree with dyn4mik3 - this isn't (only) about building your own vertical search engine. Its about processing the data for things that normally don't make it into the index (Recognizing people in pictures? Any kind of complex named entity recognition? Better NLP in general? Recognizing technorati tags not just on blogs but across the whole web? Reading XMP from files?). more

cu

vzach

[dannysullivan]

Yep, I know you can do more than build verticals -- but that's the primary thing Alexa itself is pitching.

It'll be interesting to see if people really do other things with this beyond verticals.