Build your own search engine

 

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By Steve Malone

Posted on 16 Dec 2005 at 10:48

How do you fancy being Larry Page with your own fully tricked search engine to play with? You would? How much would you consider paying? $1 billion? $100 million? How about one dollar?

That is the astonishing offer being made by Alexa, the little known search engine produced by online e-tailing giant Amazon. The company has introduced a Web Search Platform Beta. The company is putting a set of tools and an API at the disposal of budding search tycoons to allow them to develop new services from the Alexa search index

Although not the first company to come up with the idea of a set of search-based tools, for example Optevi is developing something similar, this is the first time that such an initiative has come from a company with the finance to back it.

Among the services on offer are three online web snapshots of up to 100 terabytes each, the ability to upload, compile and run your own programs on a processing cluster across the data set, integrate data into a search index and access searches through Amazon Web Services.

The aim is to attract people with new ideas on how to develop search. In practice this could mean the creation of a whole range of vertical search engines focussing on a particular topic or community or developing a local search engine for a particular area.

Customers are charged one dollar for every hour that a computer is dedicated to their use with a further dollar for every Gigabyte of data transferred between their own and Alexa's own computers. Finally, a so-called 'User Store' currently sized at 12Tbytes, is available to store user applications, source code, and output and is charged at a rate of $1/Gigabtye/year.

We expect Google, Yahoo et al's response within the next few weeks.