In a move sure to shake up the world of search, Amazon-owned search company Alexa is offering its vast index of about 5 billion documents to anyone who wants it, and anyone can use Alexa's servers and processing power to mine that index writes John Battelle, citing a couple of possibilities among many: creating a vertical search engine, or building entirely new kinds of search engines altogether - and they can run any such new service on the Amazon Web Services platform.

"Alexa Web Search Platform Beta (websearch.alexa.com) [is] effectively opening up the Alexa Web Crawl and ushering in a new era where anybody can create new search services without having to invest millions of dollars in crawl, storage, processing, search and server technology," writes the official Alexa blog.

The new service "provides public access to the vast web crawl collected by Alexa Internet. Users can search and process billions of documents - even create their own search engines - using Alexa's search and publication tools. Alexa provides compute and storage resources that allow users to quickly process and store large amounts of web data. Users can view the results of their processes interactively, transfer the results to their home machine, or publish them as a new web service," according to Alexa.

Pricing information is here.