Amazon.com is opening its Alexa search engine to web and software developers to create customized searches and vertical search engines, offering the ability to specify web crawls for the 5 billion documents in Alexa’s index.
is opening its Alexa search engine to web and software developers to create customized searches and vertical search engines, offering the ability to specify web crawls for the 5 billion documents in Alexa’s index.
Alexa, best known for the web traffic statistics it provides for sites, originated as a search company founded in 1996 by Bruce Gilliat and Brewster Kahle. Amazon acquired Alexa in April 1999 and is now offering the technology as a web service to developers.
The Alexa Web Search Platform Beta will allow developers to “create new search services without having to invest millions of dollars in crawl, storage, processing, search, and server technology,” according to a statement by San Francisco-based Alexa Internet.
Alexa and Amazon will be charging $1 for each CPU hour, gigabyte of storage, gigabyte of data uploaded, and 50 gigabytes of data processed.
Shares of Amazon were up $0.08 to $49.15 in recent trading.
Special Crawls
While other search providers such as Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft’s MSN offer developers application programming interfaces and software developer kits that enable them to create customized applications, the Alexa offering will give them the ability to do specialized web crawls to search for content.
YahooRainer Typke, a web developer in the Netherlands, has already used the service to help people search for music by whistling a melody on his web site, musipedia.org, according to Tuesday’s edition of The Wall Street Journal.
The Alexa Web Search Platform will offer three online web snapshots of up to 100 terabytes each, along with tools for sifting through content so developers can create their own data sets.
Developers will be able to upload, compile, and run their own programs on a processing cluster, store their output on a storage cluster, integrate their data into a search index, and access their search through Seattle-based Amazon’s web services.