Amazon To Shut Down Alexa Web Search Service; Practically No One Affected

Amazon is using the Thanksgiving break to quietly release some bad news — they’re shutting down one of its web services — Alexa Web Search. The service, which we first covered way back in 2006, is already closed to new customers, and existing users have until January 26, 2009 to move on to something else.—Amazon says in an email to developers that the reason for the closing is low usage, and I believe them. Google, Yahoo and Microsoft all offer competing services. On the Alexa Web Search site itself Amazon says the service has been deprecated, which is a fancy word for shut down