Google is making money mostly from ads - looks like Amazon has a different idea: open up the index, and charge based on consumption. They are opening up Alexa as a platform anyone can build on, and you pay as you go. It will be interesting to see who jumps at that:

Anyone can also use Alexa's servers and processing power to mine its index to discover things - perhaps, to outsource the crawl needed to create a vertical search engine, for example. Or maybe to build new kinds of search engines entirely, or ...well, whatever creative folks can dream up. And then, anyone can run that new service on Alexa's (er...Amazon's) platform, should they wish.

It's all done via web services. It's all integrated with Amazon's fabled web services platform. And there's no licensing fees. Just "consumption fees" which, at my first glance, seem pretty reasonable. ("Consumption" meaning consuming processor cycles, or storage, or bandwidth).

A lot of people have been talking about making search better - here's a platform that might allow some of them to try out a few ideas - without the huge expense of building up the server farm. Something to keep an eye on, that's for sure.