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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." "
Hmm Google - a search engine that displays ads, Amazon - an ad that displays searches, oh yeah that's gonna rock.
"It's so convenient to have a system where everyone is a criminal" - A. Hitler
From the 7 Reasons to Use A9.com:
Search History: All your searches at A9.com are stored on our servers and shown to you at any time from any computer you use. Clicking on a link performs the search again. You can hide the window at any time and a password will be required to open it again. You can edit your history, for example, to hide an entry.
Click History: If any of the web search results include a site that you have seen before, it's marked on the result. We even tell you the last time you visited that site.
You don't have to be among the tin-foil hat crowd to have a low regard for this "feature". There are just some searches that you *don't* want to remember.
It's not a stretch to imagine a situation like this:
Boss: "Google me some info on our competitors."
Lackey: "Check out this new A9.com search!"
Boss: "What's that link there? I didn't know you were interested in goats... [Click] Damn! You're fired!"
Stressed? Me? Of course not. Stress is what a rubber band feels before it breaks, silly.
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.
So I searched for Windows and hovered over the site info for the Internet Explorer Home Page (the second result), and the bubble that pops up says:
So people are looking for IE but turn to Mozilla instead? Are people searching for "web browser" and clicking on Mozilla out of interest?Here are the top links for "web browser": Mozilla, Firefox, Opera, Opera again, Safari, Lynx, Galeon, Netscape, Anybrowser.org, and evolt.org.
Not a single link to IE on the first page of results for "web browser"? Fishy.
There's a search history viewable to the user. So just when various senators, the EFF and half of /. were getting uppety about Gmail's ability to connect a name with a search history, Amazon do the exactly the same.
In fact, they go one step further - with Google's email you can always lie about your detals, but with Amazon's history feature you can't - it's tied to your Amazon account, credit card and all.
Of course, I Have Nothing To Hide, but I still think that comapnies shouldn't put themselves in a position where they have a load of juicy data that the police only need a warrant to get at.
It would have been smart for Amazon to keep this feature offline for a few weeks to get a better idea of how well google deals with the criticism.
foo mane padme hum
I whipped up a quick A9 Search Plugin for Firefox.
Everyone should run this search just to break in their search engine.
Amazon's "Inside the Book" search engine is a very interesting thing.
If you only need to see a paragraph to know what you need to know, you have no reason left to pay for the rest of the book.
However, most of the returns are from fiction books, so maybe you're better off just sticking with Google and saving this as a fallback only.
and patented it. Litigation begins tomorrow.
They're running some serious anti booty filters.
Try this:
Google: 'suicide girls' (you know you've been there)
Now a9 'suicide girls'
Hold the two results up next to one another. See?
Try this with other, ahem, keywords.
Does anyone know the origin of the name? It seems like they just started enumerating domain name strings starting with null until they found one that wasn't taken...
...
a1.com? no, steak sauce.
a2.com? nope. taken.
a3.com? porn site.
a9.com? unregistered. dude, we've done it!
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.
Karma: SELECT `karma` FROM `users` WHERE `userid`=138474;
Here's proof of how bad this search engine is. I searched for 'porn' and didn't find any! I'm on the 5th page of search results and still nothing. what kind of search engine can't find porn on the internet?
here's Google's (rather curious) cache
Show me an A9 cache of Google's cache and we'll talk...
They redirect and try to trap you from backing out. How refreshing. One of the web page practices I most despise.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
I like that they used a beta symbol for the B. I wonder how many people will notice.
-Colin
Ok, so A9 is supposed to be "better" than google? Well, on my first search on a9 just a moment ago, I searched on "amazon sucks" (completely irrelevant to this post) ... and then pressed the "back" button on the search results page. Well, guess what?!?! A9 has a back-button-trap making the "back" button basically useless on their site.
So, they're supposed to be better than google? What about google's clean, simple, no BS web design approach? That's google's value!! Don't you get it Amazon?!?!? Well of course not! Take a direct look at Amazon.com and you'll get an idea of Amazon's design principles.
Skiers and Riders -- http://www.snowjournal.com
To me, the best thing about Google, the reason I'd use it even if they fell down to Xty place in the Search Engine race is simply the announced, honest desire to not do evil.
How unique and wonderful was it when Google released their search engine with no ads, a clean interface, and no loathsome sponsored links? Even when they introduced ads, they made sure they're clearly labeled as such, and made entirely of text.
In short, Google treated me as a person, and not a pair of sticky eyeballs. Meanwhile, Amazon has long been known to be well acquainted with the Not-Not-Evil path -- remember the patent on one-click shopping?
Even Google's missteps have been honest. They have a cookie on their site and probably log searches, and Gmail may have privacy problems, but still, Google is probably the least evil for-profit tech company I know of.
I'll admit that I'm watching Google pretty closely at the moment to see what happens with Gmail, but honestly, so long as they're up front with users about what they're doing and don't try to bury the permission clause in the TOS language, I'm fine with it. I even had an idea for a kind of art project, a voluntary, massive, transparent clipboard sharing project, that I've given serious thought to implementing that would probably be worse than what Google's doing, but I still think it'd be okay so long as the user knows it's a privacy concern ahead of time, and has his attention purposely drawn to it, preferably with big red letters. In fact, for me that'd just increase Gmail's cool factor, as I'm so boring that any federal investigators looking at my mail would only get a good laugh and 100k of spam for their trouble.
Similar to Google A9 is running on Linux. But isn't it the first time a [major?] search engine [to be?] is running Apache?
Amazon.com => A9
.com to the end...I guess A5.com didn't sound cool enough or was already taken.
"A" plus 9 more characters.
But then you go an add a
And that, ladies and gentlemen is the executive summary for The Life Of A Slashdotter.
"I'd rather be a lightning rod than a seismometer." -Ken Kesey
It's still in beta, but so far it doesn't impress.
--
Evan
"$30 for the One True Ring. $10 each additional ring!" -- JRR "Bob" Tolkien
Besides, Google's toolbar lets you save your recent searches anyway, that's nothing new, and it saves you the five seconds that it would take to type "google.com" or "a9.com/..." for you lazy people out there.
The only reason Amazon did this is because they want more people to shop at Amazon and use their search engine (obviously). It's been tried a thousand times before. Google won the preference of millions because the ads aren't obtrusive and they weren't in the business to try to get you to shop somewhere, or join a pay service, or any of that crap that Yahoo and MSN does.
I'd say Google wins. :)
Domain name registration for $8.79 per year
879domains.co
hmmm.... but have you seen 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.
surely they deserve bonus points for that....
(plus the colour scheme aint so bad on generic.a9.com - reason enough to prefer it to regular a9!