Alexa, a subsidiary of Amazon.com that is best known for its traffic rankings, on Monday unveiled Alexa Web Search Platform, a set of online tools for searching, indexing, computing, storing and publishing vast quantities of net data. ...

Battelle said the move, if it pans out as promised, could have a big impact on the search industry, and could possibly lessen Google's growing dominance in web search.

Alexa's offering may help "create an ecosystem (in search) where something can occur outside the Googleverse," he said.
—Jeff MacIntyre, "Roll Your Own Google," Wired News, December 13, 2005

In essence, this searchable storehouse of user-contributed material reverses the usual order of things in the Googleverse. Instead of people putting up Web pages, then quivering in anticipation until Google spots and searches them, Google Base allows anyone to type information right into Google's computers — then tell Google what search queries should locate that content.
—Rob Pegoraro, "With Google Base, Ubiquitous Web Company Extends Its Reach," The Washington Post, November 17, 2005

But Google only acts on the public data that human beings are free to link to and that the Googlebot is free to discover. Private documents (email, instant messages, internal memos) are off-limits to Google. Even if you manually poured them down the Googlebot's throat, the absence of incoming or outgoing links to these documents means that they won't be placed in any meaningful context in the Googleverse.
—Cory Doctorow, "How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Panopticon," The O'Reilly Network, March 8, 2002