Alexa Decides It Wants To Be The Platform
from the about-frickin'-time dept
It's still quite amazing that the various search engines haven't been more aggressive in opening up their APIs to encourage people to build on their platform. Hooking developers into your platform is a great way to grow -- yet so many companies fear losing control. Google and Yahoo do have some APIs, but there have often been complaints about just how stingy they are. It looks like Amazon-owned Alexa is trying to shake things up a bit by really opening up their search platform and making it wide open. The Wall Street Journal gives the basic backstory, while John Battelle wonders about the domino effects of this move. While Alexa's search isn't nearly as comprehensive as others, the additional metadata it includes about various sites could be useful for certain types of applications. It seems unlikely that this will be nearly as revolutionary as some are making it out to be, but hopefully it will nudge some of the search players into realizing that they can be much more powerful by turning themselves into platforms rather than destinations.
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Logic?
Or it is that money appear out of thin air when you "do not evil".
Bah.
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Re: Logic?
The WSJ article notes how one of the first apps using the Alexa system is driving sales through Amazon. That seems like a good way to make more money by Amazon.
Also, the API has charges associated with it. The prices are low and only are triggered at high usage levels.
There are plenty of ways to make money, but the real trick is longevity -- and you do that by becoming the platform. Any company that can't figure out a way to monetize being a platform has bigger problems. :)
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Re: Logic?
Just as a couple quick examples: AIM, GoogleEarth, etc. There are probably dozens of examples if you looked, and many of them have no completely-obvious method to monetize from them, at least to me.
Regardless, they probably still monetize from them in some way that I'm not familiar with and, in addition, after a decade of use in some cases they continue to be staples of a high percentage of internet users (as in the case of AIM and other IM clients).
The poor implementations of search API's up to this point, I believe, has little to do with the challenge of making money off those efforts and are in large part due to something else.
Search is such an insanely powerful feature of the internet, that I hope that the search engines do open up their API's. I believe that everyone, both the general public and the companies, will benefit from the move.
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Re: Logic?
Phase 2 - ???
Phase 3 - PROFIT!
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ALEXA?
Aside from her, the only Alexa I've come across is consistantly identified as some type of MalWare attached to IE6.
That's enough to get me to stay away from Alexa of any sort (as if A.J. was Ever going to call).
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