We've been around for about a decade. IBM watson used us as their social data provider during Jeopardy. We provide data to tons of companies and you're probably using our services - just that it's not obvious where we're used since it's SaaS B2B and not B2C.
We're not free but the primary reason we exist is that other vendors charge borderline extortionate pricing and I fundamentally believe that the web MUST remain open.
We've also been providing data for very affordable pricing to researchers for more than a decade.
Search for us as Spinn3r under Google Scholar (our previous name) and we have hundreds and hundreds of PhDs who have access to our data.
We do charge for research usage now but it's very very very affordable.
The entire point is that we're trying to enable innovation.
This doesn't make any sense. You talk about open data but yours is the opposite. You're just another commercial data hoarder, please don't act like you're not.
You are mistaking between free and open. You can be open without being free. Maintaining web index is extremely expensive. Imagine storing most of the web on your own servers and serving it. Someone has to pay bills for all those disk space and bandwidth. I don’t think web index would ever be free (unless storage, compute and bandwidth were free) but having at reasonably priced is a very good thing. I would hope these indices are available on AWS, Azure etc where people can just use it with cloud compute and pay per use.
What? It's a nonprofit organization engaging in nonprofit business. Any organization that engages in business is a "company." Common Crawl is a company. Your comment isn't accurate and it doesn't address the parent's comment.
If your prices are so much more reasonable than competition, why are they not published publicly on your site? “Contact us and we’ll tell you the price” is shady for a service that claims to be “very very very affordable.”
Have you considered making a subset of your data open, cross-referenced from the paid data set? If other providers followed this approach, the open data set could grow and become more useful to all of the paid data providers, if only for lead generation and tool interoperability.
http://www.datastreamer.io/
We've been around for about a decade. IBM watson used us as their social data provider during Jeopardy. We provide data to tons of companies and you're probably using our services - just that it's not obvious where we're used since it's SaaS B2B and not B2C.
We're not free but the primary reason we exist is that other vendors charge borderline extortionate pricing and I fundamentally believe that the web MUST remain open.
We've also been providing data for very affordable pricing to researchers for more than a decade.
Search for us as Spinn3r under Google Scholar (our previous name) and we have hundreds and hundreds of PhDs who have access to our data.
We do charge for research usage now but it's very very very affordable.
The entire point is that we're trying to enable innovation.