Alexa Asks Searchers to Fork it Over with New Platform
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Written By Reprise Media | December 13, 2005 | Share This
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Amazon.com subsidiary Alexa yesterday unveiled an industrial-strength web crawler that will be made available to the public for a fee.
From the Alexa Web Search Platform site:
“The Alexa Web Search Platform provides public access to the vast web crawl collected by Alexa Internet. Users can search and process billions of documents - even create their own search engines - using Alexa’s search and publication tools. Alexa provides compute and storage resources that allow users to quickly process and store large amounts of web data. Users can view the results of their processes interactively, transfer the results to their home machine, or publish them as a new web service.”
This is the first time that the Average Joe/Jill has been given access low-cost access to a web crawler of this scale, the same technology employed by major engines like Google and Yahoo.
In an interview with Wired News Alexa CEO Bruce Gilliat had this to say:
“It sounds innocuous but it’s big. We’re giving access to billions of pages and computing resources…. Users have never had this opportunity before. Big industry has ruled search, because it was the only player with access to the tools.”
Not everyone is so impressed. John Battelle has mixed feelings and Danny Sullivan is showing little love.
Ken Yarmoush of Corante has more.
Topics: Search: Vertical |