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Monster mash
December 13, 2005
The free-for-all continues. Amazon.com has opened up its Alexa search engine to all comers. Just as Amazon's affiliates can tap into the company's merchandise catalog to build their own stores, so entrepreneurs and tinkerers can now tap into Alexa's vast catalog of web content to build their own applications or sites. And, for modest fees, they can even use Amazon's computing platform as their own computing infrastructure. Just plug into the utility socket.
John Battelle, who broke the news, sees this as a potential "game-changer" in the search world. Om Malik sees it as a commoditize-thy-enemy's-product tactic: "Amazon.com is trying to inflict death by a thousand cuts to rivals including the GYM Gang" - ie, Google, Yahoo, Microsoft. Phil Wainewright calls it - gulp - "a seminal moment in the dawn of Web 3.0."
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. Now, the search engine is far from the steam engine, but the example shows what can happen when you commoditize a basic piece of commercial infrastructure, giving a lot of people and companies access to it. The big question is: Are there a whole bunch of incredibly valuable search applications to be invented, or will this just set off an explosion of cute mashups? We'll see.
One other thing's worth noting: This promises to add yet a few new wrinkles to the confusion surrounding copyright and intellectual property on the internet.
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» Alexa affects ya (and you'll believe a backhoe can fly) from Computerworld Blogs
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...
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Amazon’s (Alexa’s) announcement that it will provide search as a web service has generated great excitement in the tech community. But investors don’t have the luxury of getting excited about technology; they need to predict revenues... [Read More]
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» Search is a commodity - Ad serving is the business from Don Dodge on The Next Big Thing
The headlines are screaming about the Alexa (Amazon) announcement that they will offer the Alexa index and computing platform as a web service for a fee. Monster Mash, Re-scramble of the search game, Alexa Offers Fee Based Vertical Search Service, and ... [Read More]
Tracked on December 14, 2005 11:09 AM
Comments
Its up to the technology innovators (i.e., developers) to convert this into new applications. Cute mashups are part of that process. So is the proverbial check-box features.
Posted by: Jonathan Kolyer at December 14, 2005 08:35 PM
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