Alexa Web Search
The Alexa Web Search web service offers programmatic access to Alexa's web search engine. Developers can incorporate search results directly into their web sites or services, or answer complex queries that can't be answered with traditional search engines.
The sheer size and distributed nature of the web presents huge challenges to those who wish to access the content on a large scale. Traditional Search engines allow users to interactively search for small amounts of information, but they don't let you retrieve and process large amounts of data in an automated or programmatic manner.
Alexa Web Search provides comprehensive results, with up to ten million results for each query. The service gives developers both a powerful web search engine and flexible access to the documents in Alexa's web wide crawl.
Service Highlights
- Comprehensive
The Alexa Web Search service returns up to ten million results that match a query. Instead of paging up through results 20 at a time, you can get them with a single query. You can use regular expressions to further filter your results or to extract information from the raw documents.
- Powerful
Alexa Web Search provides a powerful query syntax that allows you to use Boolean AND and OR operators, wildcards, phrases, and grouping; and filtering using over fifty different search fields. Alexa Web Search also gives you the power to post large, complex queries containing thousands of terms.
- Cost-Effective
The Alexa Web Search service allows you to do web-scale research without needing a web-scale budget. These savings enable you to focus more resources on building great solutions, instead of paying for expensive search and crawling infrastructure.
Pricing
For all requests except status and list requests:
When requesting more than 20 search results at a time:
- $0.15 per 10,000 results returned after the first 20
For more complex queries containing the OR operator, the following may also apply:
When using the "Grep The Web" feature to post-process documents using regular expressions:
(Alexa Web Search is sold by Amazon Web Services LLC)
Resources
Detailed Description
Web Search
The Alexa search engine is a web-wide search engine that powers the web search on the Alexa website. The web search service returns up to 5000 results that match a query. You can filter the results by website, file type, language, title and many other attributes.
You can also post large, complex queries containing thousands of terms that are combined with Boolean AND and OR operators.
To see how this service works in practice, use the search on the Alexa web site at http://www.alexa.com/search, which is powered by the Alexa Web Search web service.
Million Search Results
The Million Search Results feature gives you access to up to 10,000,000 results that match a query. This feature performs an offline search. When your search process has completed, the results are written to a text file, which is then available for download.
"Grep The Web"
When a document is initially added to the Alexa search index, about fifty document attributes are indexed in separate search fields. The "Grep The Web" feature allows you to filter your search results using criteria that Alexa has not indexed. You could use this feature, for example, to select documents containing specific HTML tags, links, images or JavaScript.
To use this feature, you first run a Million Search Results query to identify a set of documents of interest. Then, specify a regular expression that will filter or extract text from the actual cached documents. The output is written to a text file that is available for download.
Processing Document Content
If you need to perform detailed analysis of the content of the documents, you can use the Alexa Web Search service to locate documents of interest, and then retrieve and process the cached documents on Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) compute nodes.
Intended Usage and Restrictions
