Alexa Launches ''Search Engine for Computers"

Alexa Internet, a wholly owned subsidiary of Amazon.com, Inc. (NASDAQ:AMZN), launched on June 6th a new version of the Alexa Web Search service that returns up to 1 million search results from a single query, allows complex queries involving thousands of search terms, and gives programmatic access to the actual page content of the documents matching a query. This release enables any developer to innovate in search at web scale using the power of Alexa's search engine, web crawl and Amazon's infrastructure web services. The Alexa Web Search service is offered by Amazon Web Services at http://aws.amazon.com/alexawebsearch.

"Developers, businesses, universities and research institutions have been asking us for years to use the Alexa web crawl for their own very specific purposes. They don't want a search engine that returns 10 or even 100 results for a given word or phrase. They want a search engine they can program to return millions of results based on thousands of terms, and then analyze those results for even more specific data," said Niall O'Driscoll, Alexa vice president of engineering. "The Alexa Web Search service makes this possible, and in a simple, affordable, and scalable way. Now any developer with an idea can use the power of search to build their own business, answer complex research questions, or discover new slices of data never queried before."

Developers can use the Alexa Web Search service to build web search into their applications or services, to create vertical search engines on specific topics, and to perform custom, complex queries of data on the web and receive up to 1 million results that match the single query. In addition, they can filter or extract data from documents using regular expressions that are run across the documents matching a query.

For example, with the Alexa Web Search service, a developer could build a directory of Paris hotels. By searching for pages containing both "Paris" and "hotel" and retrieving up to a million matches, a developer could create a custom slice of the web as a starting point for a new directory. Additional processing could be as simple as using regular expressions to extract hotel names, rates, and addresses, or as complex as analyzing the full document text using Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), offered by Amazon Web Services, to identify amenities or nearby attractions. In either case, the developer is spared the difficulty and expense of spidering the web just to find the subset relevant to hotels.

Developers can process the page content of documents themselves using the Alexa Web Search service to locate documents of interest, retrieve and process those documents from Amazon EC2 compute nodes, and store their output in the Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3). These services offered by Amazon Web Services help make the Alexa Web Search service highly scalable, reliable, and cost effective. The Alexa Web Search service replaces the Alexa Web Search Platform service.

"The Alexa Web Search Platform that we released in beta two years ago was the beginning of what we are launching today. We learned that developers want even deeper access to the crawl. They want a toolbox, not a Swiss Army knife, and APIs, not GUIs," said O'Driscoll. "We listened to our developers and the new Alexa Web Search service is the result."

Musipedia (www.musipedia.org) -- a site that allows users to find songs by melody instead of title lyrics or artist -- has used the Alexa Web Search Platform to find melodies to add to their database.

"With Alexa's new Web Search service, I can do everything programmatically. I search for up to 1 million files at a time, analyze those files using my melody identification software running on EC2 nodes, and release those nodes when I'm finished," said Rainer Typke, founder of Musipedia. "And now the service is incredibly cost effective and easy to use. The process allows me to focus on my algorithms and website, and leave the web-scale infrastructure parts to Amazon and Alexa. The end result is that Musipedia users can now find many more sites with the melodies they are searching for." -Amazon.com