Alexa (owned by Amazon) is providing web services to query their index, use their processing power, etc (all for a small cost):

The Alexa Web Search Platform provides public access to the vast web crawl collected by Alexa Internet. Users can search and process billions of documents — even create their own search engines — using Alexa’s search and publication tools. 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.

Similar functions exist elsewhere (such as Google Base, Rollyo, or Yahoo APIs) which are free but this provides some extended functionality. Not to mention this allows you to do more whereas the others tend to be more constraining with their terms of use.

To be more specific, its the server farm that makes the difference…the ability to write an application that can interface with all that high performance hardware, for example.

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