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Amazon to Take on Google?

Posted by michael on from the one-click-searching dept.

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."

2 of 196 comments (clear)

  1. Didn't they up prices for loyal customers? by caluml · · Score: 5, Interesting
    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.

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  2. They need to do better than their own site by SamTheButcher · · Score: 4, Interesting
    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? :)