"Alexa Site Thumbnail" Web Service from Alexa Internet Now Available for Developers

CGIDir
Thursday, July 27, 2006; 09:37 AM

Alexa launched the Alexa Site Thumbnail web service. For years Alexa has been crawling more than 18 million web sites collecting home page images along with a vast amount of other information about the web. Now, using the Alexa Site Thumbnail web service, software and web developers can obtain programmatic access to URLs for these images in Alexa's collection, which they can use to incorporate thumbnail images of web site home pages into their own applications.

Developers can sign up and get started using the Alexa Site Thumbnail web service today at the Amazon Web Services web site http://aws.amazon.com/ast. The project's website provides a forum for developer, as well as sample code in Perl, C, PHP, and Java. The Alexa Site Thumbnail web service is sold through Amazon Web Services LLC.

"Developers are constantly looking for ways to make their websites more visually appealing and to save their users time," said Alexa Vice President of Engineering Niall O'Driscoll. "In just minutes and inexpensively, developers can use the new Alexa Site Thumbnail web service to achieve both these goals."

The Alexa Site Thumbnail web service enables developers to enhance web sites, search results, web directories, blog entries, and other web real estate with images of web site home pages that Alexa has collected from crawling the web. Including web site thumbnail images improves the user experience by allowing end users to preview sites before clicking through to the web site.

Alexa has millions of images available and is adding more daily. The Alexa Site Thumbnail web service allows developers to customize the size and format in which Alexa's thumbnail images can be displayed in their own applications. There is no minimum fee or start-up cost to use the Alexa Site Thumbnail web service.