Blog: Pete Loshin

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Alexa Web Search Platform: The Network IS the Database

The cost of building a website or webservice based on webcrawling just dropped. By a ton. Alexa just announced availability of Alexa Web Search Platform beta; fees start at $1. That's $1 per hour of CPU time, $1 per GB/year of user storage, $1 per 50 GB processed, $1 per GB uploaded/downloaded, and $1 for every 4,000 user-published web service requests.

As the announcement says: you can now get "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."

Alexa offers up this Camera Image Search application as an example of what you can do, but I imagine that there will be some much more interesting applications to come.

So look out for a whole lot of drastically new and fascinating applications to start cropping up as clever people start playing with this new toy.

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