Possible to get alexa information or google page rankings over time?
Alexa (via AWS) charges to use their API to access Alexa rankings. The charge per query is micro so you can get hundreds of thousands of ranks relatively cheaply. I used to run a few search directories that indexed Alexa rankings over time, so I have experience with this. The point is, you're being evil by scraping vast amounts of data when you can pay for the legitimate service.
Regarding PageRank... Google do not provide a way to access this data. The sites that offer to show your PageRank use a trick to get the PageRank via the Google Toolbar. So again, this is not legitimate, and I wouldn't count on it for long-term data mining, especially not in bulk quantities.
Besides, PageRank counts for very little these days, since Google now relies on about 200 other factors to rank search results, as opposed to just measuring sites' link authority.
I am trying to access historical google page rankings or alexa rankings over time to add some weightings on a search engine I am making for fun. This would be a separate function that I would call in Python (ideally) and pass in the paramaters of the URL and how long I wanted to get the average over, measured in days and then I could just use that information to weight my results!
I think it could be fun to work on, but I also feel that this may be easy to do with some trick of the APIs some guru might be able to show me and save me a few sleepless weeks! Can anyone help?
Thanks a lot !