Amazon's A9: How Well Is the Hype Justified?

An anonymous reader submits "Amazon have put up a new version of their A9 search engine. The "Beta" label was dropped, the color scheme changed, and new search types were added: Images (provided by Google), Movies (provided by IMDB), and Reference (provided by GuruNet). Several sources are already reporting this." Theopd writes with a more critical view of the hype surrounding A9's launch (note the link to battellemedia); read on below.

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."

Comments

The search results

[Jugalator]

I see the article missed a bit

Images (provided by Google), Movies (provided by IMDB), and Reference (provided by GuruNet).

... and web search results (provided by Google, with Amazon products added among them where an algorithm find them to fit).

Google also gets 50% of the revenue A9 makes from its text ads.

"the color scheme changed"

[tod_miller]

*shudders*

I hope someone got shot for that first colour scheme. It was like someone had opened up the back of my monitor and vomitted profusely into the electrode guns, and then unrinated on my retina.

quite beautiful, and grabs amazon stuff as well as google but:

it is more useful as a replacement for amazon search than google search

I would use this instead of amazon search, I can find the amazon product, and cross compare with third party sources.

I wonder if froogle results will come up for book searches :-) :-)

search test

I like thier url format, a search for orwell gives a url http://a9.com/orwell, and the results are nice, with web and images turn on by default.

Actually this feature alone makes it nice, web results and image results side by side...

Turning on more of the features makes it busy, and the history feature for your searches is a quirky idea.

For amazon searches 9/10 (because you are not in amazon)

For google + images 10/10 because it adds to the experience.

So I say it is useful.

Mozilla Firefox plug in for A9.com

[Anonymous Coward]

For those smart slashdotters who have made the switch to Firefox, you can get integreted firefox search for a9.com

Search for a9, then add it to your list of search engines!

And if your still unfortunate enough to use IE, download Firefox now!

vivisimo -- not convinced

[mattdm]

What is much
better than Google, however, is Vivisimo. The
search results are topically organized via
clustering, making them easier to navigate by
orders of magnitude.

I'm not convinced -- it doesn't seem to work well with anything I search for. It simply produces a list of vaguely relevant and vaguely irrelevant groups on the side. The only time I can see this being useful is when you search for words which are actually homonyms (or homographs, at least) -- but that's not actually incredibly common, and can be resolved easily by adding a second term to clarify.

INFORMATION COLLECTED AND STORED

[helraiz]

Here's a part of the agreement for the toolbar and it is possible that information is collected even if you are not using it. Me being an amazon.com customer, I see my full name printed at the rcorner when I went to A9.com for the first time. People blasted DoubleClick once for profiling people's online habbits and merging it with personal identifiable information. This is what Amazon is doing right now. Personally I don't care if they use this information to target "relevant" ads, but there's always a chance of it being missused.

INFORMATION COLLECTED AND STORED BY A9.COM'S TOOLBAR SERVICE

A9.COM'S TOOLBAR SERVICE COLLECTS AND STORES FULL UNIFORM RESOURCE LOCATORS ("URLS") FOR EVERY WEB PAGE THAT YOU VIEW WHILE USING THE A9.COM TOOLBAR SERVICE. THESE URLS SOMETIMES INCLUDE PERSONALLY IDENTIFIABLE INFORMATION. URLS FROM SECURE (HTTPS) WEB PAGES ARE NOT COLLECTED. BY COLLECTING URLS, A9.COM TRACKS AND COLLECTS A RECORD OF USERS' WEB BROWSING ACTIVITY WITHIN AND ACROSS WEBSITES. A9.COM ALSO COLLECTS AND STORES OTHER USER INFORMATION YOU GIVE A9.COM WHEN YOU DOWNLOAD AND INSTALL THE SOFTWARE AND INFORMATION YOU ENTER INTO THE TOOLBAR SERVICE. BECAUSE A9.COM IS A WHOLLY OWNED SUBSIDIARY OF AMAZON.COM, INC., A9.COM IS ABLE TO CORRELATE INFORMATION IT COLLECTS WITH PERSONALLY IDENTIFIABLE INFORMATION THAT AMAZON.COM HAS, AND AMAZON.COM HAS ACCESS TO INFORMATION COLLECTED BY A9.COM. AMONG OTHER THINGS, A9.COM AND AMAZON.COM USE THIS INFORMATION TO CUSTOMIZE, PERSONALIZE, AND OTHERWISE IMPROVE THE SERVICES THEY PROVIDE TO YOU.