Now this is a very interesting move by Amazon's parent Alexa. They're effectively renting out their search technology to anyone interested in mining 5 billion documents using a proven and robust search infrastructure without having to invest in building it first.
Imagine: you have the next great idea for search… What do you need to get off the ground? The first and perhaps most difficult and expensive piece of the puzzle is a good Web crawl. Your crawl will need to access a high-speed internet connection, it will need to pull down thousands of pages per second. It will need to manage thousands of connections and process pages to extract links. Then you will need to store hundreds of terabytes of data. And that doesn't even begin to tackle the rest of the equation: processing the documents, indexing, storing the index, serving it, and keeping it updated. You are going to need millions of dollars in technology and staff and at least a year to get things rolling.
Well, I don't know if that last sentence is entirely accurate, speaking from experience and even though it was more of a directory you can build something pretty darn impressive for less than a quarter million. 
Either way if you're interested in becoming the next Yahoo on a shoe string or need to index a few billion pages the day before your school project is due you can check out the site here and the pricing here.
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