As if things were boring around here, I think Amazon just shook up the world of information retrieval. Its mostly quiet Web-search division, Alexa, is opening the doors to its huge trove of Web-crawled content, allowing text-mining access to the archive. It would seem to me this is text-mining for the little guys -- an affordable way to build applications without having to host billions of documents.
The company plans to make it available at a low price point so that just about any developer who wants to can "search and process billions of documents -- even create their own search engines -- using Alexa's search and publication tools. "
Oh my, GYM just got a wake-up call.
Can little Alexa (with big parent Amazon) do what Google hasn't gotten around to yet or that IBM's WebFountain project has been trying to do for years -- make the Internet one big text-minable database that's easy to use and can produce commerical-grade business information tools? It's too early to tell, but it's all very exciting and should be great watching it unfold.
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