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Alexa Web Search Platform Released
Philipp Lenssen writes "Amazon's Alexa is releasing their search index (the same that powers the Wayback Machine) to developers via their new Alexa Web Search Platform. The Alexa framework is not for the weak of heart -- expect to learn how to use their C API, and expect to pay micro-amounts for requests and CPU cycles used -- but it also seems to be more powerful than the rival APIs from Yahoo and Google."
Alexa is notorious for spyware. Use Ad-Aware to remove Alexa if you have Alexa installed. Programmers: I will boycott all Alexa-sponsored products and label them as spyware in turn if you use this "API."
Google's APIs are better.
I'm not Seth Finkelstein. I still speak the truth.
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).
From TFWS:
$1 per CPU hour ($.50 for unused hours)
$1 per GB/year
$1 per 50GB processed
$1 per GB downloaded
and $1 for every 4000 user requests.
This is just for search service, right?
And how do these prices relate to similar services?
For those who prefer "other" languages, they provide an app that (true to unix best practices) uses stdin/stdout for communicating with other programs:
The Data Retrieval API is written in C, so it may be natural for users to develop C applications against this API. However, the Platform features a utility named awsp_cat. This utility reads CIDs from stdin and writes the raw content to stdout. Users may develop applications in arbitrary programming languages to process the awsp_cat output.
Perl developers would be able to wrap this into their existing codebase in no time, assuming they want to pay the fees.
Video Phone Blogs send video messages straight to the web.
hi,
i'll give you a friendly piece of advice.
You are under no circumstances to read TFA before making at least one post. It's fine to read it, but you must make at least one wildass guess, and pretend to know what it's talking about.
Second, even if TFA did answer your question, you should again, under no circumstances be apologetic.
Finally, welcome to /
If you don't know what AltaVista is (was), get off my lawn.
As part of the package, it appears the AWSP offers ssh access to the Alexa cluster where you can write arbitrary C code.
That seems a little dangerous, doesn't it?
'Alexa will not be held responsible for the loss or theft of information in the event of a security breach.' from: http://websearch.alexa.com/docs/faqs.html#security
Man, I would hate to see who or what is held responsible.
He who knows best knows how little he knows. - Thomas Jefferson
Nothing they try to hide deep down in some obscure EULA or anything. Sure, it's about collecting data, but there's a difference between collecting data, and collecting data by spying. The former is about doing it visibly, the other trying to hide it.
Besides, technically speaking, I'm not sure one should call a business model or an online service "spyware" anyway, as it's usually a term used for client-side software often piggybacking on another tool, that secretly phones home by using an internet connection.
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
The diffences are major. Google's API gives access to search results or allows you to execute searches that can already be done through a browser. With G's API you can build apps like Gizoogle and Google Rank Checker. Alexa's API goes beyond allowing users to execute search queries by giving up the content within the index. This is big news for anyone interested in building their own index or accessing content for other sites.
Someone can download billions of pages for several thousand dollars then use that to build their own search engine. Another user could be to mine the web for content such as email addresses(which would be bad). Alexa's announcement is a big shift and was bound to happen. Instead of getting crumbs from Yahoo & Google, they're giving up huge chunks of juicy data.
It seems some people (especially the author of the cited article) missed some very important points:
1. You have access to more than just the index - you have access to the crawled data, which is about 300 Terabyte. So, if you want to do something with the pages, you don't have to download them, you don't have to rely, that they are there - you can use the crawled data to do whatever you want.
2. The processing does not take place on your machine, but on the provided infrastructure. There is a Web-Interface, so you can administer your account, your jobs etc. You do not download any software from Alexa. You get an account on their Linux cluster and there you can compile and run your own arbritrary applications. You are able to provide these results in form of Amazon Web Services.
So, this is much more than Google, MSN or Yahoo offer, it's hard even to compare those services. Alexa is a complete different beast, and it's a huge beast.