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Despite all the hubub about Jeremy Zawodny selling text links on his site there was a noteworthy item that happened recently.  One that I think will change the way search engines operate.

Alexa recently offered it’s services for hire.  You can now hire the crawler to go index, pay to have the index sliced and even pay to host your own search service.

In this article I’m going to look at the impacts this could have on the web.

Ok, before I get into this I have to rant a bit:

<rant>

Who cares is Jeremy Zawodny sells text links on his site.  After all here’s here to make money just like the rest of us. And who cares how Google deals with it?  Do we really expect that Matt Cutts is going to “out” Jeremy or, worse yet, ban his blog site for 5 or 6 text links?  Trust me, if my site got as much traffic as his, I’d be selling a lot more than 5 or 6 links.

I mean, really, in this industry with so much happening on a daily basis, why is everyone so concerned over this issue?  Especially when the whole Alexa issue is to me much more than the flash in the pan this issue is.  I think the Sony Rootkit fiasco got less play than this did.

</rant>

OK I’m done now.  Thanks for listening :)

So anyways, yesterday Alexa announced that, for a fee, you can have virtually unlimited access to their data.  You can get the entire database if you want, or you can pay them to slice it up for you.  Ever been in the market for your own vertical search engine?  Well for a few thousand a month you could have your own hosted vertical using Alexa.

That’s right – in an almost unprecedented move (I say almost because they tried something similar a year ago and it flopped) Alexa is selling parts of itself.

I think John Battelle hit the nail on the head with his take on the Alexa announcement.  There truly is tons of potential here.  And while it can seem expensive, especially when you consider some of the costs (such as $1 per CPU hour or $1 for every 4,000 queries) I think the payoffs (if you can monetize it somehow) will be much greater.

So let’s look at some of the options:

From a user perspective there could be literally hundreds of different vertical search engines you could build out of this one dataset.

Of course any vertical you come up with would have to be unique, but I’m sure there’s something out there that isn’t being tapped yet.

From a marketing standpoint, imagine the competitive intelligence you could gather on your competitors?  You could have a mini vertical of your own industry, only accessible to you, and on this mini-vertical you could get some really detailed analysis of the sites to figure out why they rank so well.

Also, look at the other tools that could be built on top of this data – a more effective keyword analyzer than what’s currently available is the first that comes to mind.  One of my biggest pet peeves with Wordtracker is its reliance on Dogpile as a source of data.  Imagine the keyword extraction you could do directly from the Alexa index?

Who knows what else you could do with “100 Terabytes of Web content spanning 4 billion pages and 8 million sites.”

With such a large data set one could even perform some very detailed link analysis trying to understand how link popularity affects various sites on the webs.

And remember that it isn’t just web pages we are talking about.  Alexa give you complete access, which means you can also do image, sound files like MP3’s and movies.

I’m sure if you thought about it there are many different ways you could use such a data set to accomplish your goals.

So if you are a large site in a competitive industry perhaps a review of what Alexa could offer you is in order.  Whether it’s competitive intelligence gathering that you need, or a custom searchable index, I’m fairly confident that Alexa will give you the most complete view of the current search space (short of one of the bigger engines doing the same thing).

Rob Sullivan is a SEO Consultant and Writer for Textlinkbrokers.com