Developer's Corner Released Today

There is something new on our homepage, just released moments ago, the Developer's Corner.

As you may have noticed, Alexa has been building a lot of tools for developers over the last few years, including a variety of Web Feeds (URL Info, Web Search, Browse, Web Map, Top Sites and more...) plus the Alexa Web Search Platform, which gives developer's programmatic access to the Alexa Web Crawl. The Developer's Corner will be the place to go for help with these tools. This first release of the Developer's Corner contains some sample applications built on the Alexa Web Search Platform, including:

• Camera Image Search - Lets you see what pictures taken by different cameras look like
• Robots.txt Search - Lets you see who's getting blocked by whom
• Zip File Search - Lets you search for files buried in zip files on the Web

Each of these simple search engines were built on the Alexa Web Search Platform at a combined cost of less than $300. Included with each engine is a tutorial and sample code so that you can quickly get up to speed and build your own custom vertical search engine.

There's lots more to come, so stay tuned!

Watch TV Online - Channel Chooser

A new site, ChannelChooser.com, is zooming up the Alexa rankings and briefly broke into the Top 1000 sites. ChannelChooser is dead-simple and pretty neat. Just go to channelchooser.com, click on a channel, and start watching TV.

I went there, clicked the sci-fi channel, and was watching a 50's B-movie in seconds.

But it isn't perfect. First, who wants to watch TV on their computer? I suppose if the quality eventually gets good enough we could use channelchooser as a sort of virtual Tivo and start recording shows, and then playing them on our TV... but that seems to be a distant dream. Then, there is the selection. At first blush, it looks pretty good, with 70 channels to choose from. But look further. Where is ABC, CBS, TNT, HGTV, MTV??? They aren't there.

So what does the crystal ball say? Channel Chooser is interesting, but at present limited to a relatively small audience. Get more channels, get high quality video and get plugins to work with Tivo, and then we have something.

Channel Chooser - http://www.channelchooser.com - site info