Alexa opens up index and servers, just pay consumption fees |
Was about to head off to bed, but John Battelle’s blog entry on Alexa opening up their entire database of 5 billion documents — a whopping 100 terabytes of data — for almost **anybody to get inside and mash away, awakened my gaze.
But not just open, gaping wide open:
Anyone can also use Alexa’s servers and processing power to mine its index to discover things - perhaps, to outsource the crawl needed to create a vertical search engine, for example. Or maybe to build new kinds of search engines entirely, or …well, whatever creative folks can dream up. And then, anyone can run that new service on Alexa’s (er…Amazon’s) platform, should they wish.
The cost of entry is $1 per 50 gigs of data processed, $1 per gig of storage and $1 per gig of data uploaded (pictured above). I checked out the signup page and noticed you have to **”apply for an account” (this is the asterisk part in the leading sentence) and there is only a limited number of accounts being made available during the beta period. Signed up. Looking forward to chatting with an account rep tomorrow.
I’m going to do the dilligent thing and check this out further before commenting on the merits of this program. In the meantime, this is all live right now, so have at it, night crew. I look forward to reading what others have to say tomorrow.
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Amazon gibt Alexa Database frei (Alexa Websearch Platform)
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 to…
Trackback by DiTTES.iNFO BLOG — December 13, 2005 @ 3:08 am PST
[…] So it’s been more than 36 hours now since I signed up for the Alexa Web Services and no email, no call, no response from the Alexa team. Consider this my official Alexa Web Services watch (will update this post when/if I finally connect with them). Since I signed up shortly after seeing John Battelle’s post, I have to be among the first batch of folks who signed up. It’s definitely odd that I haven’t at least received an auto-reply message. […]
Pingback by Make You Go Hmm: » Alexa Web Service wait continues — December 14, 2005 @ 12:23 pm PST
you bet it’s a crazy good move by alexa….. but the thing to be concerned about is that when you’re opening up an index of this size, it would invite all sorts of spammy SEO-type folks. thats bad. on the positive side, this means less number of bots eating up your bandwidth… everyone would go to alexa for scraping data …..
Comment by saurab — December 19, 2005 @ 3:34 pm PST
[…] They could also get a Google API key and run their own searches on various child-related keywords and see what’s returned. They could also get the entire five billion websites dump from Alexa and go hogwild. […]
Pingback by Make You Go Hmm: » Google will fight feds ‘vigorously’ over search subpoena — January 19, 2006 @ 8:31 am PST