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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."
The main issue with A9.com is that it is not a radical leap forward. It will certainly enjoy the halo of recent media exposure, and it will always enjoy traffic as a result of being affiliated with Amazon.
However.
It is NOT something that is going to drive people to switch. It is some sort of confused search portal. It is another swipe at Yahoo, Excite or altavista. It is another way to search.
The results, and the display of the results, do not offer anything truly innovative. That is, innovative enough for people to say "wow!" and switch.
Thought experiment: Are you going to personally recommend A9 to people you know? I know that I told people about Google years ago. "It's better" is what I said. But it wasn't just better, it was radically better to the point where I would convince people to use it and switch.
A9.com fails the radical leap test. In the dog-eat-dog world of search engines, "better" doesn't cut it. It needs to be radically better...
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What is Amazon trying to achieve with A9.com? The thing I don't like is that all companies are trying to be all things. Apple is a software/hardware/online music store company, HP sells iPods, MS (and everyone else) is hocking an online music store while the orginal ideals are lost.
Can't someone just get good at something and then improve on that? Look at what happened to Google.
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It's going to be tough for anyone to take away Google's share of the search engine market. With all of the neat little side-projects they have going, their fans tend to be quite rabid when it comes to their search engine preference.
Is Google vs. A9 the next vi vs. emacs?
I think if the results are provided by 3rd parties (such as google), they already have the skewing well under way.
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So, its little more than an interface to Google. That's okay, I guess. It's quite a neat interface in its way, with the buttons for different categories of search.
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Just tried it out and, not liking to be limited by someone elses ideas of what constitues a "safe" result, I turned off Safe Search. Of course, in regular google, this would not pose a problem... you simply don't click on the links you don't believe are particularly savoury.
However, in a9, by default it shows images related to the search. I searched for the term hello. What do you thing I saw? A nice (gaping) thumbnail of goatse.cx.
Everytime I see that pit of despair, I swear that is the last fucking time i'll ever have to see that image, It still manages to pop up.
Clearly, a9.com isn't a new search engine - there's absolutely no improvement to the actual search algorithm - or so it seems (especially since it leeches off the search results of other engines). Perhaps the search of a new source of data (your history of searches) is novel - but even then, probably only marginally.
Where I do see the possible value in the site is the "new features" (and I'll use the term "new" very loosely) for managing information - the information in this case being search results/bookmarks - and recording/managing trains of thought. Sorta like a lab book for a research scientist, here's a tool that allows you to perform the searches you search every day through say Google, but also record the sites you've visted during your searches, perhaps write a small entry about why you visited there and the relative value to the item you were searching for, and then to retrieve those thoughts later when you perform a related search (and perhaps find you had a related search you had forgotten about).
As many have pointed out, this concept isn't necessarily new and I'm not sure that A9's method is the right approach (too early to really tell...). Examples of more likely competitors would be: Onfolio (albeit, not directly in search - but similar enough in terms of "managing internet research"); Endeca - they call their concept "guided search" - part of which is the ability to search in the context of past searches; or even iKeepBookmarks.com (never used it, just googled for something similar;) which allows you to manage your bookmarks centrally online. Amazon's "unique" approach here is to do the management with search results, but all the same, it's just an info management tool.
So, given that Amazon has one of the largest databases of consumer information (both individual and aggregate trends, habits, etc) and they've never really ruled out being a company who will use that info to their advantage, I'm a bit concerned about A9's storage of my trains of thought and searches...and since they plainly say in their privacy agreement that "customer information will of course be one of the transferred assets" in the unlikley (their words) event that they sell the company. Ok, so Amazon sells the company to a marketing company who then uses the info to innudate you with advertisements in multiple forms (there doesn't seem to be anything limiting them from sending you email or contacting you via other means if you provide them with the info).
Taking away any problems with a big company warehousing your data (and personal trains of thought), the idea is intriguing - but I don't need yet another tool for managing my information in a narrow niche way (I already have too many of those). If it integrated with a tool I already use for managing info I gather (say, like my private database of links - or my file system even) - then it might be cool. Otherwise, I save my links (and my lab books) pretty effectively already - and without the targeted advertising.
My 2 cents.
Is it legal? Yes it is considering Amazon is paying licensing fees to Google ... Those are Google AdClicks. So Google makes money from you viewing those ads on Amazon. In addition, Google is a major investor in A9. So basically Amazon is doing all the grunt work and Google is raking in the financial benefits.
Anyone else think A9 is just diverting requests to Google and reformatting the results? Yes, that's EXACTLY what it does
This isn't A9 vs Google, this is Google vs Google+AmazonAds. Wonder who's gonna win
I would say, RTA(rticle)!
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Yeah, it sure is slick, at 92 kilobytes... In comparision, Google main page is only 9 kilobytes, of which 8 kilobytes is the logo. Result pages are upwards from 100 kilobytes. This includes bloated table-based design, some ugly javascript hacks of undeterminable usefulness, sign in for a search engine instead of anonymous cookies and a fucking diary!
While A9 may not win any bloat contests among search engines, calling it "slick" is a bit of a misnomer.
When I am in the mood for some indie searching, I'd rather use Vivisimo, Teoma or All the Web.
P.S. A9 may be great and all, but at 100KB per page I am not using it.
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