Exclusive: Alexa Web Search Platform Beta

alexa-logo.jpg

Amazon have been beta testing their web search platform and we have managed to get a hold of some screenshots as well as some information about it. Alexa is giving users and developers access to their crawler in order to build their own search engines. From the website:

The Alexa Web Search Platform provides 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.

It seems that users will be able to create any type of search engine, indexing particular types of data or a single or set of particular sites. This service seems to be very powerfull and ambitious, how well it works has not yet been determined. There is a form on the site to register for the beta, but we know that there are only a very small number of users at the moment so your chances of getting in soon are small.

alexa-screenshot1.jpg

alexa-screenshot2.jpg