Roll Your Own Google

[David Farber <dave () farber net>]

Begin forwarded message:

From: Dewayne Hendricks <dewayne () warpspeed com>
Date: December 14, 2005 10:50:44 AM EST
To: Dewayne-Net Technology List <dewayne-net () warpspeed com>
Subject: [Dewayne-Net] Roll Your Own Google
Reply-To: dewayne () warpspeed com

[Note:  This item comes from reader Randy Burge.  DLH]

> From: Randy Burge <burge () proactiveteams com>
> Date: December 13, 2005 8:46:05 AM PST
> To: Dewayne Hendricks <dewayne () dandin com>
> Subject: Roll Your Own Google
>
>
> To access the live links in the article:
> <http://www.wired.com/news/technology/0,1282,69817,00.html? 
> tw=wn_tophead_2>
>
> Roll Your Own Google
>
> By Jeff MacIntyre
>
> 02:00 AM Dec. 13, 2005 PT
>
> In a move with potentially far-reaching implications for the search  
> market, Alexa Internet is opening up its huge web crawler to any  
> programmer who wants paid access to its rich trove of internet data.
>
> Alexa, a subsidiary of Amazon.com that is best known for its  
> traffic rankings, on Monday unveiled Alexa Web Search Platform, a  
> set of online tools for searching, indexing, computing, storing and  
> publishing vast quantities of net data.
>
> Alexa claims it's the first time that developers, students and  
> startups will be given inexpensive access to an industrial-scale  
> web crawler -- the same technology used by industry giants like  
> Yahoo (Yahoo Slurp) and Google (Googlebot).
>
> "It sounds innocuous but it's big," said Alexa CEO Bruce Gilliat.  
> "We're giving access to billions of pages and computing  
> resources.... Users have never had this opportunity before. Big  
> industry has ruled search, because it was the only player with  
> access to the tools."
>
> Alexa spiders 4 billion to 5 billion pages a month and archives 1  
> terabyte of data a day. The new platform will allow developers to  
> build their own search engines.
>
> "If it is what they claim it is, it strikes me that this is  
> nontrivial news," said search industry pundit and author John  
> Battelle. "Anyone can crawl the web, but crawling and maintaining  
> an index at scale is very difficult and very expensive. They are  
> providing convenient access to something that was very dear."
>
> Battelle said the move, if it pans out as promised, could have a  
> big impact on the search industry, and could possibly lessen  
> Google's growing dominance in web search.
>
> Alexa's offering may help "create an ecosystem (in search) where  
> something can occur outside the Googleverse," he said.
>
> To illustrate the new service's potential, Alexa developed a photo  
> search engine that allows users to query photo metadata normally  
> hidden from standard keyword searches, such as the date the photo  
> was taken or the camera used.
>
> Musipedia, another Alexa prototype, provides users with the ability  
> to search the web by melody. Give the engine a keyword or melodic  
> contour, and it returns similar music. Musipedia allows users to  
> input their own whistling as a query.
>
> From computer scientists to web hobbyists, Gilliat predicted  
> Alexa's inexpensive services will spawn numerous creative results.  
> Costs are priced at $1 per transaction, which range from a CPU hour  
> of computing time to gigabytes of uploads and downloads. Gilliat  
> said a complete web snapshot should cost a "couple thousand" dollars.
>
> [snip]
>
> <http://www.wired.com/news/technology/0,1282,69817,00.html? 
> tw=wn_tophead_2 >


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