Tim O’Reilly is speaking right now and he just covered Amazon’s opening up of their A9 search engine to the public. A9 can be used by anyone to search the web. You now can spider the web yourself, figure out a cool way to mashup that into your application, whatever you want you can do. The power of a major search engine is at your fingertips.
Not really news though… that came out sometime in 2005 I think.
What is interesting is Tim discussing how he had a discussion with Sergey Brin (Google) about this. Sergey basically told him, “Why would people use this, they can just use Google Alerts”. Tim doesn’t think Sergei gets it. I agree.
What A9 is doing is democratizing search. It takes a lot of money to get your own search engine going. Not anymore.
March 8, 2006 at 12:46 pm
>You now can spider the web yourself, figure
>out a cool way to mashup that into your application,
>whatever you want you can do. The power of a
>major search engine is at your fingertips.
Hash you may be interested in a test site I have
started building that uses a similar idea, but using
the Yahoo API. It is at http://noga.muti.co.za
It tracks search terms for various python
web frameworks over time providing a picture
of their relative popularity. Aj and I were discussing
ways that we could maybe incorporate this into
muti as well by tracking things like the popularity
of politicians or any conceiveable set of related
items.