Amazon Changing the Search Game?

The blogosphere is lighting up with the news that Alexa, owned by Amazon has opened up their search and statistics data. John says they have about 5 billion documents stored in 100 terabytes and this entire thing is now available via the good old AWS, the Amazon Web Service. The Alexa Web Search Platform has put together an example at photo.alexa.com in which you can for example search for photos made with the Canon EOS 350D (or RebelXT how it is called in the US). As shown in the price guide, you pay:

$1 per cpu hour

$1 per GB/year of user storage

$1 per 50 GB processed

$1 per GB uploaded/downloaded

$1 for every 4000 user-published web service requests

I really need to check back with this $1 per GB/year again. That part alone is interesting enough. You can also use the system to publish your own search engine on their servers. All this stuff is getting mighty interesting and Amazon is starting to become an amazingly interesting company.

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