Everyone knows about the Amazon E-Commerce services and everyone loves it. It’s a simple, too simple really, way of starting your own Amazon affiliate store. Not to mention for gathering information from Amazon. Take a look at Amazon.com and you’ll see why people want that information, they have everything, literally.
Amazon also has another very interesting service, Alexa Web Information Service. Some service highlights:
- Gather information about Web sites including traffic data, contact info, related links and more.
- Access an XML-based search index based on Alexa’s Web crawl and incorporate search results into your site or service.
- Build a Web directory into your site or service using an Alexa enhanced DMOZ-based browse service.
- Use the Alexa WebMap to gather links-in and links-out information about all pages on the Web and invent wholly new search engine algorithms.
Bascically, AWS is a service that provides you with Alexa data, something that till recently, Amazon guarded very well. But with data mining techniques becoming more and more advanced by the day, it wasn’t really worth it. Developers could still get what they wanted, it just depended on how badly they wanted it. Amazon, in my opinion, did the right thing by opening up this data to developers, for a fee ofcourse. The charges aren’t much, first 10,000 requests every month are free and thereafter they charge $0.00015 per request or $0.15 for 1,000 requests. Very reasonable if you ask me.
I recently had a client who wanted domain information, traffic, rank, reach etc etc for over 10k domains on a bi-weekly basis and he wanted this in Excel. I’ll leave the excel part for another day but I made him a nice little job scheduler in PHP (What else?) where he could decide what job would execute when and delete and add jobs by simply uploading a text file containing the domains list. I made him a cute looking interface as well where he could check the progress of each job and see how things were going. I sometimes wish PHP has a better way of doing the whole cron part. I have no idea how or why that would be done but there’s nothign wrong with wishing. :p
There’s something to be said about Amazon really. When i first used their Web services, I wasn’t impressed but now I must say I should have been. The standards they follow, the structures, the methods, everything are so common throughout the services, it’s wonderful from a developers point of view. Once you know how a service works, there’s nothing stopping you from learning the next service as well because all you need to change is the Operation types and the ResponseGroups and you’re set. That in no way says it’s easy to pull data off Amazon’s XML’s but it isn’t difficult like many other services. (Hello Directi!)
All in all, i’m very happy I got to do the project, I hadn’t visited Amazon’s services in a while and this was the perfect project to refresh my memory. And a thumbs up to amazon for a wonderful API.
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