Since it appears that Amazon’s latest Web search adventure is going to be in the news for awhile, I thought we might as well look into the latest on tools you can use with them…

The Web search arena just became a little more crowded as Amazon.com has announced that it is opening programmer access to its Web crawler, Alexa, for a small fee.

Heretofore, Alexa has been known more for traffic rankings than searches, but the newly unveiled Alexa Web Search Platform will give developers access to online tools for searching, indexing, publishing, computing, and storing Internet data.

“Today, Alexa is releasing the Alexa Web Search Platform Beta, 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 [Relevant Products/Services from] Microsoft Relevant Products/Services from Microsoft’ alt=’Relevant Products/Services from Microsoft’> technology,” read a post by Geoffrey Mack, product manager at Alexa, on the Alexa Web site. [Read the rest]