Amazon Shakes Things Up
Posted by Jacob Harris Thu, 15 Dec 2005 01:42:00 GMT
I really must hand it to Amazon/A9/Alexa. They have consistently delivered more innovation to the developer than those two combined. Amazon started to impress me when they allowed any application to search their extensive database of product information. Directly they have earned nothing from this, but it more than makes up for itself in good will and inspired purchases. Amazon understands Web Services.
Amazon also has a search engine. But here they are not the market leader like they are for books. Poor A9, always ignored while Google and Yahoo and MSN get copious amounts of press and praise. But this has been good to spur on Amazon and Alexa (their search company) into creative new territory for their search engine. A9 has already received some attention for their YellowPages data that includes photos of storefronts; that’s certainly cool, but it’s just content. On the other hand, OpenSearch is a cool change to the spider-driven notion of search content. Google may have specified their sitemap standard for giving hints to spiders. But A9 did that one better with their OpenSearch RSS extensions, which allowed any site to package itself as a channel for A9.com. This allows sites to handle search requests dynamically at the time of request, rather than creating documents to then be spidered and cached.
To illustrate why this is a cool idea, suppose I had a site that did hotel bookings. I could create an A9 channel that could accomodate search requests for things like “nyc hotels” with actual hotels and rates from that moment. If people had date information, I could be more clever, but the key of this is that Amazon is handing over control of their search results to the end sites. As long as a user is willing to trust a channel enough to add it, A9 is happy to get out of the way.
Of course, there is nothing to make syndicated OpenSearch sites obey search rules in the same way A9 does, but who cares? As Google’s success with a single bar shows, people care less about all the little details of searching (boolean vs. web syntax, stemming, relevance scoring) than just being able to find stuff. Amazon gets this, but Google seems to have forgotten it.
But Amazon/A9/Alexa’s latest move has really blown me away. In recent years, a lot of search providers have found additional revenue in peddling search appliances to companies. Essentially, you sign a contract with a company Google and buy a local web spider that crawls content you specify. You then pay Google a price based on support, how many documents you plan to index, and how many users will search your index. There are limitations to keep you from turning Google against themselves and all pricing is set up front rather than growing with use, and prices can approach up to $2 million up front. More importantly, you are not actually using Google’s index, just recreating part of it independently. And while Google has much vaunted data centers across the globe, enterprise customers get only a single box or two to place in their own data centers if they have them.
Amazon has been interested in entering the enterprise market, but they did not want to be in the business of creating hardware servers for enterprise clients (Google will always be better at that). And that’s when someone at Alexa had the brilliant idea of opening up their entire search index data to the outside world. And what makes it additionally brilliant is that you install nothing locally (everything is done via Web Services) and pricing is set by consumption and not by contract, meaning even the most modest users can do something with the backend data. Users can write programs to process data sets, implement their own additional indices on top of A9’s basic web search, or even just analyze a massive collection of web pages for statistical goals. In some sense, Amazone allows customers to not just outsource spidering but also maintenance of indices they’ve built.
It’s a brilliant move, and I must applaud Amazon for the creativity of their vision. Forget Google and Yahoo, Amazon is doing more to turn Search into a utility than the any other company around.
