Amazon have been beta testing their web search platform and we have managed to get a hold of some screenshots as well as some information about it. Alexa is giving users and developers access to their crawler in order to build their own search engines. From the website:
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.
It seems that users will be able to create any type of search engine, indexing particular types of data or a single or set of particular sites. This service seems to be very powerfull and ambitious, how well it works has not yet been determined. There is a form on the site to register for the beta, but we know that there are only a very small number of users at the moment so your chances of getting in soon are small.
The screenshots look pretty impressive. Amazon has never failed at anything big. I hope this one will actually be useful to web developers.
Michael, is this a play to disrupt Google and get it to refocus?
By the way, You mis-spelt ambitious. You’d think with all the innovation in web2.0 these days they’d have spell checkers in blog software :p…
But anyway this looks very very interesting. Giving the power to the people hey? I guess this will encompass everthing from crawling a users personal web site to creating full niche search engines. I’d love to see how customisable it is. It will be a while I guess. Congrats on alexa/amazon for keeping ip with the race though, they are doing well in my opinion.
wow superb service
next thing i hear is that theres going to be a unique search engine created using alexa and launched in 10-20 days
googles api is very very limited
so is vasts api also
bye
Whoa.
Spammers are gonna tear this thing to pieces.
hey all, i am new at this, certainly not new to computers, have a Gmail account but can not get a gmail address for email purposes. ? reasons i guess because i am a 30 year combat Vietnam Veteran, us marines need signs to show us just about everything, thus because I live in the Philippines with my 29 year old beautiful wife, even though we both have cell phones, but google says Philippines is not on their list to sign up for gmail….so can someone invite me please??
thanks in advance if anyone takes me up on this…god got to be some americans out here who still have some compassion left for an old “jarheaqd” respectfully
Gene & Jennifer Murphy
RE: Above Comment
Note that you forgot the “m” in “.com” when listing the web site to which your name links.
Anyway, I attempted to send a Gmail invite to the address shown at the bottom of your site but it came back with a delivery error: “PERM_FAILURE: SMTP Error (state 9): 551 not our customer.” Then I whois’ed your site and sent it to the listed proxy address.
I signed up for Alexa Web Search Platform in mid-December then got the rejection notice a month later.
I was planning a memetracker-related search.
One thing I’ve never been able to figure out: does Alexa have its own crawler, or does it use its network of installed clients to pull Web data? Maybe some of y’all know.
I saw this in December last year but they never let me in. I also can’t access Amazon’s Mechanical Turk without a US bank account.
Great, and the screenshots sure look impressive ! Thanks for the informative information !
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Great, and the screenshots sure look impressive ! Thanks for the informative information !