John Battelle has an impassioned posting about Alexa’s blow-us-all-away announcement that it is opening up its 5 billion-document index to anybody that wants to use it. Alexa, owned by Amazon.com, will also offer up for a fee ($1/gig of storage, $1/50 gigs of data processed, $1/gig of data uploaded) its servers and processing power to mine its index and create all kinds of new applications, including specialized search engines.
Due to an embargo, Battelle couldn’t bounce this big news off of anyone and wonders what it all means. He’s certain of one thing:
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.
While this is a major development in the whole field of search, I’m not so sure that Google and Yahoo have much to worry about yet. 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. If folks spend a lot of money (most of it in personnel costs) and time fiddling with Alexa’s data only to discover their work has been undermined by the GIGO (garbage-in, garbage-out) effect, Google (and Yahoo) still come out on top.
Cynthia Brumfield at 8:42 AM|Comments(0)
Blogs We Read
