Is Google loosing its edge?

Google has recently become a synonym of leading edge both in business and technology. And there has been a good reason to expect new development and ideas come from them. So I was really surprised when this new and exciting concept came from Alexa.

Alexa, an Amazon.Com company, on December 12, 2005 made its search infrastructure available to developers. This is very significant move that changes the perception of what can be done with Internet search. So far we have been able to search within the already prepared index. With Alexa crawlers, we can build custom indexes with custom attributes. As an example Alexa shows an image search application that lets users specify image-specific attributes like camera make and model and aperture settings and other. These attributes are not usually available in image search indexes (like Google Images). The applications for the web search platform are limited only by creativity of their creators. You could imagine programming the crawlers to gather things like insider and business activity for monitored stocks, isolating clusters of activity for various news topics and developing custom research projects.

On the other hand this experiment will yield significant data to Alexa itself. Put simply - they will know what people want to crawl the Internet for and what are the results. And this may develop a new wave of services for end users. Finally it proves the point there is no monopoly for innovation and even Google has to be alert and agile, as the others are not asleep.