Google, Yahoo, and AMAZON?!

Holy destabilization of the search landscape Batmen and Batwomen!

Amazon's ALEXA.com has been ranking and archiving the web for some time, creating what may be the web's largest archive of old site info plus a ton of current info. Google guards their algorithm and data stores as trade secrets, as does Yahoo.

NOT SO ALEXA who has announced they are opening up the data store, adding advanced programming routines for the grabbing, and opening up to anybody with a .com and a prayer.

I'll test the beta soon hopefully, but this could be big. REALLY BIG if the routines are powerful. Some have suggested this will be a sort of IBM Webfountain for the masses. Webfountain is arguably the world's most powerful and best search, so if Alexa can scale that power to mass information retrieval some really interesting stuff may happen in search.

This is yet another step to users ruling the roost as they rightly should.