Amazon Offers Alexa Search Index to Everyone

Amazon Offers Alexa Search Index to Everyone

In a move sure to shake up the world of search, Amazon-owned search company Alexa is offering its vast index of about 5 billion documents to anyone who wants it, and anyone can use Alexa's servers and processing power to mine that index writes John Battelle, citing a couple of possibilities among many: creating a vertical search engine, or building entirely new kinds of search engines altogether - and they can run any such new service on the Amazon Web Services platform.

"Alexa Web Search Platform Beta (websearch.alexa.com) [is] effectively opening up the Alexa Web Crawl and ushering in a new era where anybody can create new search services without having to invest millions of dollars in crawl, storage, processing, search and server technology," writes the official Alexa blog.