Alexa.com announced the Alexa Web Search Platform Beta ( websearch.alexa.com ). It seems to be great, you can use all the alexa infrastructure and data with your own Perl or C programs. What do you think? It is worth to study the API docs?
Incorporating search engines such as Alexa or Google, which also publishes an API, can be an interesting way of letting your users do full or partial web searches without leaving your site. I do not know how useful it is or whether irt really adds much to your site. I know some sites try to put the output into a frame so that you are always looking at them. Once I realize I am searching Google or whatever, I close the window and open Google or whatever and continue onward. I wrote a search engine for a website and it ws discovered that people often tried to use it to search for unrelated material. In that case, it would have been nice to be able to weave local and non-local results. It might have even resulted in a more useful result, from the website's perspective. Probably, the latter approach -- which could be the more difficult -- might be the best.
The Alexa API gives you much, much more possibilities than the Google Search API. But You have to be a real expert to use the alexa data (Linux, C,..).
Alexa wants "$1 per cpu hour ($0.50 for reserved but unused hours)". Does anybody know how many hours are needed to analyze the whole alexa data? How much have I to pay to build the sample application photos.alexa.com? Reply With Quote