Amazon's Search Engine Goes Live

fjordboy writes "John Battelle has posted a discussion and review of Amazon's new search engine: a9.com. From the article:"What makes this particularly noteworthy is that A9 is built quite literally on top of Google. In short, Amazon has taken the best of Google, and made it, to my mind, a lot better. Sound familiar? Yup, it's what Google did to Yahoo, Yahoo to Netscape...you get the picture." "

Comments

People who searched for "warez" also read...

[LostCluster]

This really doesn't seem to be much of a breakthrough aside from the fact that they are running your serarch past Google, Amazon.com and Alexa at once and presenting a unified interface.

This is like an infomerical from Amazon trying to pretend to be programming. I'll take my Google straight, and go to Amazon.com when I want to go shopping, thank you very much.

Re:People who searched for "warez" also read...

[radixvir]

interesting actually searching for warez returns no results....they must be censoring the results when its in their best interest (they sell software).

Reputation

[SeanTobin]

I used to use altavista as my search engine way back when. Then, they decided that thier users were less important than thier customers. From there after about 8-9 months of use and being set as my homepage - I dumped altavista for google.

Google has proven over and over again that thier primary concern is for thier users. They have found ways to make money via ads that in no way interupt the user. New features are constantly being developed that will benefit users.

[side note: I am planning on signing up for gmail and using it as my primary webmail app. I do not consider it an invasion of privacy if I see an add for serial cables when someone sends me an email with a set of rs232 pinouts. I actually find it to be a unique situation where both google's users and customers can benefit]

Now, look at amazon. This is a company that has decieved users numerous times. Anyone remember the price mismatches between repeat customers and new customers? How honest is my search going to be if I look for '+"golf club" order online'? Something tells me I'll end up at a amazon.com page.

I understand that a similar situation could occour with froggle. The fact is it has not happened in either of them yet. However based on reputation, I would bet it would happen with google last.

Re:Tinfoil Hat Not Required

[MrBlue VT]

Yeah, the fact that they don't provide direct links to the pages also throws my paranoia into overdrive. This is the link that you get when you search for Slashdot:

http://a9.com/-/search/a9-redirect.jsp?url=http:// slashdot.org/&title=%26lt%3Bb%26gt%3BSlashdot%26lt %3B%2Fb%26gt%3B%3A+News+for+nerds%2C+stuff+that+ma tters&token=0A3316C2D3DF4FF99CB34DD1FCCFD04B&t=108 19845643&qt=ws

Clicky.

So basically they can track whatever pages you go to.

On Linux, Again

[AnuradhaRatnaweera]

Similar to Google A9 is running on Linux. But isn't it the first time a [major?] search engine [to be?] is running Apache?

Re:Tinfoil Hat Not Required

[pyrros]

I'm also concerned with this, although google seems to do the same thing from time to time (actually quite rarely)

But they do seem to have something for the tinfoil hat crowd: generic.a9.com. They claim that they dont keep any info from searches done through there.

If you would prefer not to be recognized on our site, we recommend that you use our alternate service located at generic.A9.com. On generic.a9.com, we will not recognize your A9.com or Amazon.com cookie. Information we gather on generic.a9.com will not be used in our data analysis (other than to detect abuse) and will not be used to personalize the services we offer you. [link]