Re:Thoughts on Yahoo BOSS Monetization (from Duck Duck Go Fo...
by gojomo on Friday February 13, 2009 @02:10AM
(#479575)
Amazon's Alexa subsidiary once offered a service much like you describe, called "Alexa Web Search". But: "The Alexa Web Search web service has been deprecated and is no longer available for new subscriptions." [1] Also, I think (but am not sure) the Alexa Web Information Service originally offered hosted read access to the full content of Alexa's recent crawls, but it no longer does. [2]
It also seemed like Amazon was building up web-scale search expertise in A9, but the only apparent results are work in metasearch/aggregation. (They already have a technology called 'OpenSearch' [3], so might have a hard time repurposing that name for something else.)
So it's almost as if Amazon was deeply considering your proposed strategy, then backed away.
[1] http://aws.amazon.com/alexawebsearch/
1) Google, who has no incentive to do this because it disrupts one of their two core businesses. They're happy to let you put Google Search (TM) Powered By Google The Company That Owns Search In Case You Forgot on your site, but they have no reason to enable other competitors for searching. (Search engine "partners" who display Google results are just dupes who increase Google's reach marginally and will never challenge Google seriously because they're locked into being inferior clones of Google.)
2) Microsoft, which institutionally doesn't quite grok the whole "You can put this API on the Internet, and then people use it, and then you make a lot of money" thing yet.
3) Yahoo. Which did Boss.
4) Amazon, which has the technical chops to do computing at the scale they need to, but not the institutional knowledge to run a crawl-and-search operation.
5) Ask (or your favorite non-American leading search company), which are outside possibilities probably limited by their ability to scale the cloud.
Really, I think Yahoo is the best position to execute on this at the moment. If I were an exceptionally forward thinking person at Amazon, I would think of buying myself a startup with a working crawler and search engine, and then release OpenCrawl and OpenSearch to the community on the same day I announced AWSSearch, which uses Amazon's own, managed, infinitely scaling versions of OpenCrawl and OpenSearch (i.e. "we already did the crawling and index-building, you just consume the data!").
Of course, that would basically be like smacking Google in the face with a glove. The idea is that search is a lot like webmail: all services are essentially identical feature-wise, and you compete essentially on branding, user experience, and (most importantly) user habit.
Webmail has switching costs, yeah, I know. I honestly thing people switch mail more than they switch search engines. Case in point: how much would I have to offer any one of you to never Google again? Yeah, that's right.
So Amazon doesn't have any reason to want to run a search engine, which are commodities hoping to carve themselves a little branded niche. But they could make great money supporting an ecosystem of little one-off branded search engines. (Especially after they introduce AWSAds, their advertising contextual web service.)