Opportunities in Search engines?
I’m reading Tech Beat, “Amazon Thinks Out of the Search Box, Again” and John Battelle’s “Alexa (Make that Amazon) Looks to Change the Game” and I’m thinking there may be some kind of an interesting opportunity here.
Alexa is essentially going to turn their whole model inside out and allow anyone to essentially pay for using their content and infrastructure. You will now be able to write code that sits atop their 100 terabytes of data and oodles of computing power to mashup your own search engine.
I can see this warranting some in-depth research for my search-engine impassioned client, for sure, and for anyone else that wants a potential piece of the current search engine frenzy market.
Update:
Then again, Here’s Jeff Clavier’s “Repeat after me: the index of a search engine is a commodity” take on it.
This is a great idea because Alexa has no limit to how many searches are allowed and you have more control compared to Yahoo’s, Google’s and Msn’s apis. I also beleive you can throw ads in these results as well unlike other apis. What I’m not sure of yet is if this is going to be an api you can mash up or something else.
There has been a lot of interest in this that my contact at Amazon told me that there is now currently a wait list.