John Battelle has the scoop - Alexa is making its dataI available on the Amazon.com Web Services platform, and it’s a really big deal.
Amazon’s Alexa is opening up its 5 billion web documents and 100 terabytes of data to anyone who wants to use it. Included in this data are Alexa’s famous site rankings based on toolbar users.
As John says, this certainly opens up entirely new classes of search engines and other applications that can be built by leveraging this data.
Alexa is charging for its data, but it isn’t much.
The first 10,000 requests per month are free. Thereafter, requests are charged at a rate of $.00015 each (just 15 cents per thousand requests.). For example, if you make 100,000 requests to the Alexa Web Information Service during a given month, you will be charged $13.50. Your first 10,000 requests are free, while your remaining 90,000 requests are charged at a rate of $.00015 each: .00015 * 90000 = $13.50.
This is a developing story and some of the links are not live yet. More on this as things progress.
UPDATE: Richard MacManus, Om Malik and Dan Farber have more.
Alexa get a Web 2.0 transplant. Alexa’s move is a classic ‘dead man walking’ move. Total game changer because they need to change the game. Alexa is old and outdated. This is a Web 2.0 transplant in order to save the dying patient.
Om comments echo this..â€Interesting move, but quite understandable. Amazon knows it has little or no chance of being a player in the search game.â€
One thing which may make this work would be if this move stiumulates more people to actually use the alexa toolbar. An enhance d toolbar would be a lot more valuable then the one now which makes you wonder who’s using it.
Actually, the “Web info service” and $0.15/thousand has been around for months. That provides access to the Alexa metadata (e.g. traffic and links).
The new service provides access to page contents too (though it’s not clear if pages are updated nearly as often as Google, Yahoo, etc.). Alexa’s new pricing is $1 each for various amounts of disk, CPU time, etc. See http://websearch.alexa.com/docs/price_guide.html
For a skeptical take, see Search Engine Watch: http://blog.searchenginewatch......213-085247
At first glance (I read the Alexa FAQ and such), I’ll throw my hat in on the skeptical side. But, I’m happy to be proven wrong by entrepreneurs who make good use of the new platform!
I wrote about this in my blog http://www.simonmcdermott.com in October, as Scott Lawton says it is not really new…But, if it inspires Google and Yahoo to do the same (i.e. offer API access for business + developers for $) it is excellent, it’s very web 2.0
This was launched early October as I tested/prototyped it back then. Their API is by no means easy and require advance developer skills to implement.
With that said, I found some of the search results to be extremely irrelevant and disappointing. I don’t know if they got better since October but the web service search results did not reflect the same search results you would see on A9 for a given query.