Ho John Lee’s Weblog

Amidst the speculation about the Amazon Unbox video download service, Amazon has quietly launched aStores, a service providing custom online storefronts for Amazon affiliates. (You may not be able to view the link unless you’re an Amazon affiliate.)

aStore by Amazon is a new Associates product that gives you the power to create a professional online store, in minutes and without the need for programming skills, that can be embedded within or linked to from your website.

Here’s a link to their demo store.

You get to pick up to nine “featured items” to put on the home page of the store, choose product categories, and add reviews and editorial content. The shopping cart and fulfillment are handled by Amazon, with standard referral fees going back to the affiliate. There’s a browser based interface for building a store on the Amazon Affiliates site. The resulting store can be hosted by Amazon or on your own site.

Wow! Although the basic idea is straightforward, crawling and indexing for a general purpose search engine requires huge resources. Web crawlers are effectively downloading copies of the entire internet over and over, turning them over to indexing applications which scan the contents for structure and meaning.

The sheer scale of the task is a substantial barrier to entry for anyone wanting to develop a new indexing or retrieval application. Some projects have narrowed the problem domain, which can reduce the problem scope to a manageable level, but this announcement from Alexa looks like it may offer an exciting alternative for building new search applications.

John Batelle writes:

I came across a cryptic link to mturk.com on supr.c.ilio.us, asking “Isn’t that how the Matrix came to be?”

Amazon Mechanical Turk provides a web services API for computers to integrate “artificial, artificial intelligence” directly into their processing by making requests of humans. Developers use the Amazon Mechanical Turk web services API to submit tasks to the Amazon Mechanical Turk web site, approve completed tasks, and incorporate the answers into their software applications. To the application, the transaction looks very much like any remote procedure call: the application sends the request, and the service returns the results. In reality, a network of humans fuels this artificial, artificial intelligence by coming to the web site, searching for and completing tasks, and receiving payment for their work.

All software developers need to do is write normal code. The pseudo code below illustrates how simple this can be.

Yahoo has a major update to Yahoo Maps this evening, bringing it back on par with Google Maps, and with a full set of web APIs for building mapping applications.

From the Yahoo Maps API overview:

Building Block Components

Several Yahoo! APIs help you create a powerful and useful Yahoo! Maps mashups. Use these together with the Yahoo! Maps APIs to enhance the user experience.

• Geocoding API - Pass in location data by address and receive geocoded (encoded with latitude-longitude) responses.
• Map Image API - Stitch map images together to build your own maps for usage in custom applications, including mobile and offline use.
• Traffic APIs - Build applications that take dynamic traffic report data to help you plan optimal routes and keep on top of your commute using either our REST API or Dynamic RSS Feed.
• Local Search APIs - Query against the Yahoo! Local service, which now returns longitude-latitude with every search result for easy plotting on a map. Also new is the inclusion of ratings from Yahoo! users for each establishment to give added context.

Alexa Web Information Service has been in beta for a year and is officially launched this week.

The Alexa Web Information Service provides the following operations:
URL Information
Examples of information that can be accessed are site popularity, related sites, detailed usage/traffic stats, supported character-set/locales, and site contact information. This is most of the data that can be found on the Alexa Web site and in the Alexa toolbar, plus additional information that is being made available for the first time with this release.
Web Search
The Web Search operation is a brand new search index based on Alexa’s extensive Web crawl. The search query format is similar to a Google query and allows up to 1,000 results per page.
Browse Category
This service returns Web pages and sub-categories within a specified category. The returned URLs are filtered through the Alexa traffic data and then ordered by popularity.
Web Map
The Web Map operation gives developers access to links-in and links-out information for all pages in the crawl. For example, given a URL as an input, the service returns a list of all links-in and links-out to or from that URL. This Web map information can be used as inputs to search-engine ranking algorithms such as PageRank and HITS, and for Internet research.
Crawl Meta Data
The Crawl Meta Data operation gives developers access to metadata collected in Alexa’s Web Crawl. For example, a developer can get pages size, checksum, total links, link text, images, frames, and any Javascript-embedded URLs for any page in the crawl.
Pricing
First 10,000 requests per month are free
additional requests are $0.00015 per request ($0.15 for 1,000 requests)