Alexa öppnar sitt index

Alexa har öppnat index för tredjepartsutvecklare. Även för kommersiellt användande. Helt klart mycket intressant.

Hos John Battelle:

"In short, Alexa, an Amazon-owned search company started by Bruce Gilliat and Brewster Kahle (and the spider that fuels the Internet Archive), is going to offer its index up to anyone who wants it. Alexa has about 5 billion documents in its index - about 100 terabytes of data."

"The fees? One dollar per CPU hour consumed. $1 per gig of storage used. $1 per 50 gigs of data processed. $1 per gig of data uploaded (if you are putting your new service up on their platform)."

Många fler bra kommentarer i bloggvärlden.

TechCrunch: Alexa Totally Gets It, Opens Up API

Om Malik: Amazon's Alexa Commoditizes Search. Håller inte med. Dock sänks kostnaderna för innovation genom att större mängder data, för första gången (?), blir tillgänglig till en relativt modest kostnad. Billig data kan på samma sätt som open source sänka fasta kostnader och därmed möjliggöra innovation.

Read/Write Web: Alexa turned into web service - Amazon back to its innovative best.

Geeking With Greg: AWSP offers shell access at Alexa? "You have to hand it to Amazon. They've been doing an amazing job thinking outside the box lately. But, sometimes, the box is there for a reason."

Got Ads?: Why Alexa WSP is a big deal. "Simply put, AWSP allows you to do computation on Alexa's computers. Those computers have the internet itself (> 100TB) in local storage. Back in October, Alexa's AWIS (which Paul referred to) only allowed you to access the data, and not do computation."

Due Diligence: Index as Process. "In this hidden dual space of search, Amazon's move has a potential benefit as well. Google, for instance, is a monoclone. It has "One Algorithm to Rule Them All" (PageRank) and that becomes a singular point of attack and reverse engineering for dark side assailants. If third party utilization of the Alex/Amazon index becomes more diverse and specialized, it will consequently become a harder target for the index attackers, who have a more diffuse target with less value to be derived by any given exploit."

Software Only: Repeat after me: the index of a search engine is a commodity. "So... What does it mean to have an index just 25% (-ish) the size of Google's and Yahoo's available to anyone and everyone? A few thoughts:" Det är bra tankar. Surfa dit och läs dem.

Mer hos Alexa om vad som erbjuds.