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"Well, I hate to say I was right.  But I was right!  Sort of.  Amazon is turning its Alexa search engine into a web service.  It's called the Alexa Web Search Platform.  John Battelle writes:\n\nAlexa, an Amazon-owned search company started by Bruce Gilliat and Brewster Kahle (and the spider that fuels the Internet Archive), is going to offer its index up to anyone who wants it (details are not up yet, but soon). Alexa has about 5 billion documents in its index - about 100 terabytes of data. It's best known for its toolbar-based traffic and site stats, which are much debated and, regardless, much used across the web.\nOK, step back, and think about that. Anyone can use Alexa's index, to build anything. But wait, there's more. Much more.\nAnyone 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.\nIt's all done via web services. It's all integrated with Amazon's fabled web services platform. And there's no licensing fees. Just \"consumption fees\" which, at my first glance, seem pretty reasonable. (\"Consumption\" meaning consuming processor cycles, or storage, or bandwidth).\nThe fees? One dollar per CPU hour consumed. $1 per gig of storage used. $1 per 50 gigs of data processed. $1 per gig of data uploaded (if you are putting your new service up on their platform). \n\nAmazon really gets web services - last month I wrote a post called Don't Underestimate Amazon, in which I said: \"companies like Amazon are quietly changing the world - and getting away with it\".  Of course, they're not getting away with it anymore - the release of Mechanical Turk and the opening of the Alexa API have made people realize that Amazon really is an innovator.  I also put forward an idea last month for Distributed Processing as a Web Service, where developers are charged for CPU cycles - this is what Amazon plans to do with Alexa.  But in this case the processing is centralized, rather than distributed over P2P.  So in many ways we shouldn't be surprised by this latest move - it's something that has been on the cards for a while now.  Nonetheless, this is certainly a game changer - Amazon's second-rate search engine has suddenly become a major player that could chip away at the dominance of Google, Yahoo and Microsoft.\nUpdate: more from Om Malik, TechCrunch, Read/Write Web, Michael Parekh and others"^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://mashable.com/2005/12/13/amazon-opens-up-alexa-search-api-revolutionizes-search-overnight/>