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Alexa is a little-known search company owned by Amazon, which is primarily used by search marketers as a basic statistics provider.

Alexa collects site data such as visitor rates and exit points from users of its popular toolbar and calculates how popular a website is in any given week. It is also the spider that maintains the Internet archives , affectionately known as the WayBack Machine. On Monday, it released a press statement that basically said, Alexa is open for business.

As of this week, Alexa is offering web developers the chance to harness and use data accumulated by its spider. For a very low fee, developers can even program their own search engines. According to the material posted on their site, " Alexa provides compute and storage resources that allow users to quickly process and store large amounts of web data. Users can view the results of their processes interactively, transfer the results to their home machine, or publish them as a new web service."

This is a major step forward for those wishing to create web services based on spidered search content. Alexa is providing both spider and storage space for a relatively low cost. Pennies if one considers the costs associated with programming and data warehousing.

Here is a short breakdown of their pricing fees:

Jim Hedger is the SEO Manager of StepForth Search Engine Placement Inc. Based in Victoria, BC, Canada, StepForth is the result of the consolidation of BraveArt Website Management, Promotion Experts, and Phoenix Creative Works, and has provided professional search engine placement and management services since 1997. http://www.stepforth.com/ Tel - 250-385-1190 Toll Free - 877-385-5526 Fax - 250-385-1198