Amazon's Alexa Revolutionizes...What, Exactly?

Lots of buzz out there this morning about Amazon's new plans for Alexa: Open up the search archives and let developers slice and dice them and then build new applications on top.  Some have suggested this development is so radical it is potentially world-changing.  If so, count me among those don't "get it" (to invoke one of the most odious mantras from the 1990s).

So people can now build their own search engines even more easily?  Aren't search engines already ridiculously simple to create? (there being no other obvious explanation for why there are so darn many of them).  Is Amazon going to make a killing charging $1 a gigabyte?   What am I missing?

Comments

[brad]

While not rocket science, it is very difficult to crawl and appropriately extract precise information at scale. Check out openlist.com -- a vertical search engine in the restaurant and hotel area -- where I am an investor. We have had to develop a very complex infrastructure to try to find the relavant information we want to compile from thousands of different sites while excluding the irrelevant. Our goal is to much more precisely aid consumers to find what they are looking for - like "award winning french restaurants in NYC" http://www.openlist.com/restaurants-browse-new_york!-french-all_awards.htm. We, like lots of other vertical search sites, have made progress - but this progress will be greatly accelerated by searching against a database that is already tagged. While I would not call this revolutionary, I would argue that it will lead to more focussed applications that are more efficient than Google at helping people find what they want.

[Delicate Genius]

Can I also add that Google already has an API to allow developers to hook into their search engine, and it's cheaper than $1, in fact it's FREE.

I can understand that Alexa does things differently to Google, and offers different capabilities. However for the most part, I don't see why Google's free web service is that different.

My thoughts http://www.delicategeniusblog.com/?p=97

-dg

[Margaret Olson]

The Google API is rate limited and the license has commercial use limits.