Alexa affects ya (and you'll believe a backhoe can fly)

In today's IT Blogwatch, we look at the uncritical, breathless buzz generated by Amazon's Alexa web search "platform." Not to mention Nizlopi and his unexpected contender for the UK's Christmas #1 single...

Is the Alexa news ground breaking? Or is it just "breaking news"? Either way it's certainly getting attention from the blognoscente. John Battelle broke the Alexa news thus: "Every so often an idea comes along that has the potential to change the game...  In short, Alexa, an Amazon-owned search company... going to offer its index up to anyone who wants it. Alexa has about 5 billion documents in its index - about 100 terabytes of data ... OK, step back, and think about that. Anyone can use Alexa's index, to build anything. But wait, there's more. Much more ... there's no licensing fees. Just "consumption fees" which, at my first glance, seem pretty reasonable. ('Consumption' meaning consuming processor cycles, or storage, or bandwidth) ... In other words, Alexa and Amazon are turning the index inside out, and offering it as a web service that anyone can mashup to their hearts content. Entrepreneurs can use Alexa's crawl, Alexa's processors, Alexa's server farm ... Does this change the game? ... You guys are smarter than me - what do you think?... I am quite sure this means that Yahoo and Google will have to stare hard at their own (somewhat limited) search services and APIs, and think what they might do to compete, that much is certain." ["Mashup" -- adding functionality to an existing web app, usually via an API. Example: plotting traffic congestion on a Google Map.]

» Pat McCarthy, Conversion Rater: "Not only can you use all that data, you can use their storage and server processing power to run your applications. Of course there is a cost, along the lines of $1 for every CPU hour you use, $1 per GB of user storage, $1 per GB downloaded, and $1 for every 4,000 web requests.  What does this mean? It means a lot. Creative people are going to be able to create some amazing things very quickly with this. Take a look at the digital camera photos search they Alexa has up as an example application." [This sample app. is actually an interesting way to compare the real-world quality of different camera models]

» Rob Hof, The Tech Beat: "If you haven't been watching what Amazon's doing outside its famous Web store, you've been missing a lot. Its A9.com search site offers some pretty neat tools for searching specific Web databases. Now, it has just opened up the index that its Alexa unit created to track Web site data, for relatively small fees ... They include the ability of outside Web and software developers to tap into not only Alexa's vast index but also the computing power it wields to create very specific search engines and add those capabilities to their own services. There are a lot more possibilities to come ... But suffice to say it's pretty clear that the search game is far from over." [Hmmm, shame the Alexa toolbar is flagged as undesirable by many anti-spyware tools]

» Mike, Techdirt: "It's still quite amazing that the various search engines haven't been more aggressive in opening up their APIs to encourage people to build on their platform. Hooking developers into your platform is a great way to grow -- yet so many companies fear losing control. Google and Yahoo do have some APIs, but there have often been complaints about just how stingy they are ... While Alexa's search isn't nearly as comprehensive as others, the additional metadata it includes about various sites could be useful for certain types of applications. It seems unlikely that this will be nearly as revolutionary as some are making it out to be, but hopefully it will nudge some of the search players into realizing that they can be much more powerful."

» Danny Sullivan of Search Engine Watch is a voice in the wilderness, crying, "I guess I get to be the underwhelmed one about Alexa announcing a new Alexa Web Search Platform that's available to anyone willing to pay a fee.  Pay a fee for what? You can create your own search engine ... You can search against the entire index or just a selected set, in case you want to make your own vertical search engine ... But spending money to lease search services? That's a remnant from the days before search ads, when search engines wanted to be paid for storage and processor time ... It also has to be said that the Alexa pitch would be a heck of a lot stronger if Alexa itself actually used its own web index. But it doesn't. Alexa depends on Google to give it a reach well beyond the 4 billion pages that Alexa has gathered" [Interesting point!]

» Ho John Lee: "Not every search and retrieval application is necessarily going to fit onto the way Alexa has built their crawler and indexing infrastructure, or onto any other search engine platform, for that matter. But opening up access to more of the platform should make it possible for a lot of new ideas to be tried out quickly without having to build yet another crawler for each project."

» Cynthia Brumfield, IPDemocracy: "For one thing, it's not easy for anybody to handle massive amounts of data, to figure out how to scan it, how to interpret it and how to display it. That requires specialized, expensive expertise and a little company in Mountain View is buying up all the best engineers capable of doing this work. Secondly, as Battelle points out, Alexa is best known for its tool-bar based traffic and site stats. These stats are so off-the-mark at times as to be laughable -- and I wonder if Alexa’s index is any better. Quality counts when it comes to search, and this is Google's secret sauce: Google’s results are remarkably accurate and thorough and up-to-date."

»  Nick Carr, Rough Type: "Whether Amazon's looking to make money or make it harder for rivals to make money, the move does look like something of a watershed. What's interesting is that it separates, or unbundles, the 'engine' that, in a real sense, powers the web from the applications of that engine. And it turns the engine into a cheap commodity. It's not hard to think of what happened when another engine -- the steam engine -- became a commodity a couple hundred years ago. An incredible number of applications of steam power were rapidly invented."

Buffer overflow:

• Groklaw: Peter Quinn Exonerated
• Arstechnica: Microsoft and MCI announce PC-to-phone VoIP
• Eripsa: Happiness in slavery
• Arstechnica: Friends don't let friends talk and drive
• Matt McAlister: How to drive your company faster
• Doug's Oracle Blog: In Praise of Good Trainers
• Schneier on Security: FBI Speaks Sense on Cyberterrorism
• InfoWorld TechWatch: Google Calendar said to be close to launch
• Kimberley Brown: Airport Security Humor
• Scoble, R.: Can I shoot someone?
• Arstechnica: Numbers in from Japan: Xbox 360 fizzles
• Jesse Keating: Die Java Die!
• Martin MC Brown:  Linus prefers KDE
• Alex Scoble:  Privacy and anonymity online mostly an illusion
• Alex Scoble:  Keeping your computer, keyboard and monitor clean
• Martin MC Brown: Forced OS updates followup
• Shark Tank: But boy, does that technology ever work!

And finally... Unexpected contender for Christmas #1 single in the UK -- you'll believe a backhoe can fly (and just like yesterday, stick it out to the end)

Richi Jennings is an independent technology and marketing consultant, specializing in email, blogging, Linux, and computer security. A 20 year, cross-functional IT veteran, he is also an analyst at Ferris Research. Contact Richi at blogwatch@richi.co.uk. Also contributing to today's post: Judi Dey, our very own Antipodean.