It looks like Alexa (the Amazon-owned search company) is going to become an extensible search platform.
Alexa willl allow developers to request custom data as it spiders the web. The beta service, Alexa Web Search Platform, launched late Monday; it's designed "to allow developers to build applications and/or services utilizing Alexa data." The first 10,000 requests per month are free with additional requests at $0.15 for every 1,000 requests). Other charges cover storage, dedicated CPU use, etc. Users can add custom search fields and eventually will be able to build custom search engines without reinventing the wheel.
At first glance this might not seem like such a big deal. After all, Yahoo! and Google already expose a search API. Alexa is going a step further though, letting you program directly against the index with a much more robust API. They'll even go a step further and handle the processing and storage for your program.
This unlocks a lot of opportunities that were not possible with the previous search APIs. It may not be "free", but the initial overhead is a definitely a lot less for the individual or small development shop. Instead of worrying about the infrastructure and crawling, we can worry about the intelligence itself.
Really, this is no different than what's going out for awhile now. Development frameworks like J2EE and .NET simplify the "mundane" and let us worry about what we are trying to build instead of reinventing the wheel. The real significance of the blogging revolution is that it enabled an entire mass of people with no technical expertise to publish content on the Internet.
Alexa is going to do the same for business intelligence and search. I'm going to have to set aside some time to get my head around the possibilities...
Think about it - this could really change things.