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Amazon to Take on Google?
KRck writes "Looks like Amazon is going to jump into the search engine business and try and compete directly with Google, by building a new company A9 which they hope to launch in October."
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No, they didn't do that, they randomly chose prices for some items a while ago.(it was like a multiple choice, you could get price A, B, or C) the cookies, just made sure that once you got A, you still got A, they were testing the market. After it all blew through they charged everyone the lowest price for the item.
Amazon is not building a search engine like that which most people are familiar at Google. Amazon wants to build a search engine specifically to sell products. So, if you're interested in the ins and outs of rebuilding a '57 Chevy or tracking down some problem with some old Sun SPARC Station you bought on eBay, forget it. It's just going to be a mechanism to point people at Amazon affiliates.
...it can be useful, once in a while.
Unlike Google, A9 isn't trying to develop an all-purpose search engine that indexes billions of Web pages. The startup instead is zeroing on a one of search engines' sweet spots -- e-commerce.
Treehugger? Treehugger... Treehugger!
A9 isn't owned by Amazon - it's its own company that happens to be ventured by Jeff Bezos. Of course, you'd be excused for not knowing that since CNN didn't make it clear, and the slashdot paragraph is like a book report based on the text at the back of the book.
I mean, realistically, Froogle.com aside, Google can really search very simple static content. Put a CGI form on your website and Google will stop there. Put anything on your website that ties into a complex request and Google won't touch it.
Therefore, I don't think that the spin "A9 is going to compete with Google - the leader in this space" makes much sense, since Google is (yet) not the leader in this space - it's the leader in the static page/document search space. Seem like two different things.
Amazon is not looking to compete with *google* they're looking to compete with *froogle*, google's product search engine. In both A9 and Froogle, companies can set up data feeds that update the product/price database.
Amazon is *not* trying to index the web.
"The startup instead is zeroing on a one of search engines' sweet spots -- e-commerce.
As more consumers have become comfortable with the Internet, a growing number are using search engines to review products and compare prices."
Why not just use froogle.google.com? It's excellent for comparing prices if you know the model of what you're looking for.
One thing you might not realize... if you enter a query into Amazon and either drill through the results or get no results, you eventually wind up with a powered-by-Google web results set.
But why would anyone think that Amazon could be trusted for e-commerce searches? If someone is selling a product for a lower price than Amazon is, do you really think that their search engine will point me there?
But they already do, and have been for quite a while. (If you actually used Amazon, or really knew anything about it, you'd know this.)
It's not really that unusual to have the "available used or new from [price]" line be lower than Amazon's new price. One of the great things about Amazon's business model is that it encourages this kind of openness. They took quite a bit of heat forthis not long ago, when some authors strenuously objected to Amazon offering used copies of thier books listed on the same page as new ones. (And Amazon itself doesn't even sell used books, although they do get a small cut of used sales through partners.)
It's hard to imagine a more fair, balanced, and open business model than Amazon's, regardless of the popularity of Slashdot Amazon-bashing...
"The future's good and the present is nothing to sneeze at." - Roblimo's last