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Amazon's A9: How Well Is the Hype Justified?
theodp writes "As Amazon's search service A9.com officially goes live today after being in beta for months, it's receiving rave reviews. A Business 2.0 story penned by John Battelle says A9 has raised the bar for innovation in search. Paying heed to John Battelle's statement that Google and everyone else involved in search are going to be watching A9, BusinessWeek asks: Can Amazon Go Beyond Google? And the NY Times reports that A9 is insanely powerful (story linked above), relying on a quote from - you guessed it - John Battelle. The NYT notes that Battelle is the organizer of the upcoming Web 2.0 conference, but doesn't mention that his conference's keynoters include A9 CEO Udi Manber, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, Amazon Board Member John Doerr, Amazon's Wall Street Cheerleader Mary Meeker, and Amazon subsidiary Alexa's Brewster Kahle."
I'm still the first hit result for my name, so it's cool by me ;)
What? Where's the "Google Killer" headline? I thought that's what every tech news sotry was about these days, "killing" something else.
Maybe A9 should have gone into making steak sauce, instead.
Me: I A9'd for it.
I think you meant, "I Googled it on A9"
Free XBox, PS2
Damn straight, this IS a killer feature!
No need to add in the extra "hentai" keyword in the query... A9 automatically adds it in for you!
I'm soooooooooooooooo ditching google now!
Founder of Mirror Moon - Tsukihime Game Trans
"It's early, and my tinfoil hat kept poking me in the head as I slept last night, I think."
You sleep wearing your tinfoil hat? I find that a tinfoil nightcap works well. I also use a tinfoil blanket on my bed, so when it gets cold I can just pull that up over my head and sleep well knowing that I'll be warm and my thoughts protected.
Is Google vs. A9 the next vi vs. emacs?
I would never kill a man for using A9.
I'll tell you exactly why. Let me paint a picture for you. Your significant other comes into the room behind you and says, theluckyleper, it's my mother's birthday next week. Let's order her something from Amazon.com. So you pull up the page, and based on your search history, it says:
Welcome theluckyleper, (If you aren't theluckyleper, click here)
Theluckyleper, based on your searches and purchasing history, we recommend the following for you:
Never confuse volume with power.
There must be a preference setting somewhere that says "show me the porn and sick stuff" because so far the two links (resident evil and hello) havent showed me either anime porn or our great goat leader....
OMG, I took my tinfoil hat off for one second, and you managed to read my mind?
Time to invest in that tinfoil skull plating...
Visit the Game Programming Wiki!
In other words, A9 is NSFW? Nice feature.
So I decided to search for "Alexa" since the web search results were "enhanced" by Google and Alexa. Along side the search results were the image results. A naked "Alexa" appears as the first results.
This is a damn good search engine for that reason only (ha). Good thing I was at work, though...
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I kind of liked it. I did a search on myself, and it created several groups, one of which was all about me, and one of which was about my evil, hockey-playing Google-nemesis.
I've been plotting and scheming for years about how to take back the crown from that bastard.
You want the truthiness? You can't handle the truthiness!
Check out the first image result for Microsoft! Seriously though, I am pleasantly surprised at how good the search engine is performing.
If only EULA lawyers would learn the tolower() function...