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."

Comments

Didn't they up prices for loyal customers?

[caluml]

I remember reading about Amazon using cookies to raise the prices for returning customers. How do we know they won't monitor searches, and use it to put up prices for things that you might be interested in?
Case in point: I was buying a ticket for a flight, and when I started, there were lots of available seats on a variety of days at 317 each way. By the time I had gone through the process, put in my credit card details to buy it, and hit submit, a message appeared saying "The seating information has changed, please start from the beginning again." Magically, all the seats on all the same days had jumped to 900 each way. My point? I don't know. But Amazon has played dirty before. And I don't trust them.

Anyway, I didn't book my tickets with British Airways. Some other mug will have to pay the inflated prices.

Natural Biases

[silverHat]

Maybe it's just me, but I'm pretty sure that I will not be able to count on Amazon to give me back non-biased results whenever I'll do a search. Being a -company- where profit is far more important than anything else, will they try to capitalize on it buy throwing in it's own products before someone else's?

It's probably legal, since it's Amazon's search engine, but if I'm looking for a new blender or whatever, I can bet a million to one the first couple ( if not more ) links will be geared toward amazon.com

Reminds me of the MSN search engine.

They need to do better than their own site

[SamTheButcher]

For instance, I used to go to CDNow.com for all of my music info needs - tracklisting, release dates, etc. I forget the exact details (I've written a previous rant about it), but I searched for either a song or album and the relevant search was 68 results in. Their engine seems to search word for word.

Okay, here you go. Went to amazon.com, searched for song title "The Ocean". There might be a few, but I'm looking for the Zeppelin song. Out of 4686 results, you can only sort by alpha, A-Z or Z-A. That. Sucks. Result #2 does not have any song called "the ocean", but rather a song called "(More Like An Ocean That A) Bathtub" - I'm assuming they mean "Than" instead of "That" but whatever.

CDNow would return a list with all songs called "The Ocean", then return songs with the word "Ocean" in the title. Amazon's search engine sucks, and I think they're in way over their head on this one, but I could be wrong. I have been before.

Additionally, if they're targeting a narrower audience, then they're not going up against Google, now, are they? :)

Amazon/Alexa has a good spider/crawler..

[ron_ivi]

Alexa, the guys who are behind Archive.org, one of the biggest internet archives, is an amazon company.

I've noticed more activity from their spider (useragent ia_archiver) than I have from google on my domains recently; so I tend to believe they have a more up-to-date and possibly larger index.

Re:Thank goodness!

[dmeranda]

Well, there perhaps is a little more overlap than you may think. Remember some of Google's appendages such as Froogle and Google Catalogs. Granted however, Google is generally about finding information, and it seems like Amazon is really positioning themselves to find products/vendors.

But serious competition may be good, even if its not directly the same market. Things like this help keep great companies like Google working hard. As long as it is competition. I really don't want non-competitive devices such as patents or other legalease destructiveness to be raised.

If you think back to how Amazon got started, selling books, what I'd really like to see some day is something more along the lines of a library. And one which was indexed with something like Google's technology. I'd like to be able to search for books on something other than just the title, author, ISBN, etc. Granted Amazon has made some book searching progress, with the introduction of buyer-reviews and linking similar books together based upon who buys what other books. But wouldn't it be great to be able to find books based upon some text in the book? But given the sad state of copyright law, that will probably remain science fiction.

Froogle?

[Adam9]

What about Froogle?

Taken from this page:

Froogle is a new service from Google that makes it easy to find information about products for sale online. By focusing entirely on product search, Froogle applies the power of Google's search technology to a very specific task: locating stores that sell the item you want to find and pointing you directly to the place where you can make a purchase.

I've only tried it a few times awhile back, and it seems to work pretty well. Will this compete with A9?

not all cheesies and gum

[poptones]

I admit google is my first pick as well, but don't dismiss ANY latecomers at this point. It's not just the spoofers and spammers who have weasled their way in - I've done many searches where the first several pages were basically useless ecommerce sites and even done searches where no useful information could be found there at all. Google is a great search engine, but it's nothing near the greatness it had as little as a year ago. Give it another year or two and someone is sure to come up with something better - even if it's google itself that is finally forced to do it.

Your search found... 40 CDs?

[nanodik]

The problem here is that when people search the net for "Britney Spears", they're not looking to buy her CDs - but that's will be what they get with Amahoo!!!

Hmmm..

[adeyadey]

I will wait and see. If you *have* to have a dominant search engine, Google is not such a bad one to have, the adverts (sponsered links) are intelligently placed, and not too intrusive. God, just think we could have Micro$oft as the #1 search engine.. Shudder..

So, I, for one, welcome Google, our current search-engine overlords..

Re:Didn't Amazon already do this.

[RobertB-DC]

Amazon already bought an e-commerce search company for over $100 Million.

And boy, were they excited:

"PlanetAll is the most innovative use of the Internet I've seen," said Amazon's founder and CEO Jeff Bezos. "It's simply a breakthrough in doing something as fundamental and important as staying in touch."

"This is a significant opportunity for all of us at Junglee to extend our technology well beyond our current base," said Ram Shriram, president and COO of Junglee. "With Amazon.com, we can address the larger challenges of e-commerce sooner--and on a broader scale--than we could have done alone."

I guess the technology Amazon obtained for "equity valued at approximately $280 million" has gone to good use. Hard to tell, though, since both partners' websites have gone up in smoke. I wonder if Amazon will even bother to renew the domains, which expire in May and October 2004?

For some reason, I don't see much of a future for the A9 project anymore -- as if I ever really did...

They already have something of this sort

[$exyNerdie]

The other day I searched Amzazon's website for the PC Infrared (IrDa) adapter and they showed a section called "Sponsored Links" on their website.

Here are the details of Amazon's Sponsored Links

Copy and paste of the text:

SPONSORED LINKS

Sponsored Links are advertisements that Amazon.com provides to you. We receive Sponsored Links from Google's AdWords service. When you click on a Sponsored Link, we get revenue. The selection of Sponsored Links that are displayed is based on keywords. For example, if you search for "Bruce Springsteen" or view pages about Bruce Springsteen, the Sponsored Links may point to sites that sell tickets to his concerts or provide information about him. Sponsored Links are always clearly labeled.

Generating additional revenue from Sponsored Links allows us to offer lower prices to you--something we are dedicated to doing every way we can.