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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."
A9 has a lot yet to prove. It isn't "wide spread" so the optimizers haven't pounded it yet and figured out how to slew the results. It's not being widely used, so we can't particularly tell how the load balancing is set up, or how "quick" the searches will be. Finally, while most search engines started out anti-advertising, it only took a while for them to develop a following and then implement advertising to improve their profit outlook.
We'll see.
A9.com personalizes your search experience by remembering your searches
Could it possibly do this with cookies? What if you search a lot?
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When I hunt for something on the web, I usually refer to the search as Googling - I almost always use Google to find whatever information I'm looking for. A9 doesn't really work as well. For example:
Before
Other student: Hey, cool page - where'd you find it?
Me: I Googled for it.
After
Other student: Hey, cool page - where'd you find it?
Me: I A9'd for it.
Yeah, definitely feels wrong...
Gotta get me one of these!
I just hopped over and searched for Resident Evil 2, and lo and behold, I got anime porn pictures down the right side!
Yes, Google has just been erased from my memorybanks thanks to this killer feature.
Hm... the privacy policy says they won't share user data with 3rd parties, but they do store it, and will share it with subsidiaries like Amazon.com.
On generic.A9.com, we will not recognize your Amazon.com cookie
So, on regular A9.com they will recognize your Amazon.com cookie? Nice! So now they can link your purchase history and your search history.
Hm, I don't really know why this is bothering me so much. It's early, and my tinfoil hat kept poking me in the head as I slept last night, I think.
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I never heard about a9.com before I found the /. story. I tried it and it has a clean interface
and the results are displayed in a non-bloated
layout. Its good that someone tries to integrate
Google and other Search engines into a single
interface. It has been tried before, but this looks
different. I think I'll continue to use it.
Note it's definitely NOT safe for work. Gahhhhh
Yeah look. They're a great company, with one assert, search. It's obviously clear how they're scrambling to counter the threat from Microsoft, or lest they be snubbed out.
... is synergy and convergence ...!
They're expanding out to community building. This is clear from the unified login you can share between Google groups, and Gmail. Aren't they also doing some friendster like thing? Orkut? They've reached into the OS, via the toolbar, but if it stops there, you can rest assured, Google will be no more in ten years.
The keyword
You're absolutely right about A9. 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 like my women like I like my tea: green-
I would prefer Amazon to work on the search of their own site before moving to the web. If you could filter results like ebay does, things would be so much easier to find.
Also, the search in amazon.com doesn't bring up most likely results. If I search for the name of a song, I get all cd's with songs with those words in it alphabetically. Searching under "song title" for unforgettable gets me 662 results, starting with "The Unforgettable Year 1919', Op. 89: The Assault On Beautiful Gorky"
Tough but not impossible. Remember when you thought the same about Altavista? Yahoo!? Hotbot? Webcrawler? etc. etc. Do you seriously think that Google is the last word in search engines? I'm not saying that A9 is The One but I've been on the web long enough to know that Google will be replaced one day. As it stands now, it'll most likely be Microsoft's offering.
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Nothing I can't get via Google or Dogpile or any number of other search engines. Google is still champ for the clean interface with simple tabbed options.
And I really hate the Amazon tie-in with the cookie tracking my name, search history and etc. That's too creepy for ordinary searching. The last thing I need to know at a later time is some of the weird meaningless shit I sometimes look up on the web. If I need to know where I've been I have my own browser history I can look back through.
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Come on folks read the freakign fine print..
Google is an investor in a9..
and even google results are supplied to a9 by license with google..
boy did Business week goof up huh?
Don't Tread on OpenSource
I've searched through the *for profit* GuruNet service, and I'm not really that impressed. As a long time user of Wikipedia, I have all the information there at my finger tips. Try a few searches on GuruNet and then do an equivalent on Wikipedia...I have yet to find a topic where Wikipedia doesn't blow GuruNet's information out of the water.
It's a shame companies like Amazon don't embrace open, community supported services like Wikipedia for tools like A9. I would be much more likely to use A9 if they did...as it stands, it's just added, wasted effort.
I dunno. I think the interface is clean, and I like that the graphics are down the side. Most of the time when I search google, I wind up switching to images.google to see what's up as well. Sometimes I hit up froogle to check prices on things I'm looking for.
Combining three searches in one easy-to-view interface is the same sort of revolution Google made over AltaVista.
Hey freaks: now you're ju
Vivisimo fails the laziness test - ease of typing.
Go ahead and try it:
google.com
yahoo.com
a9.com
vivisimo.com
Definitely powered on several levels by Google. I was surprised (probably shouldn't have been) to see several of *my* Google ads running as ads on A9.
The Glass is Too Big: My Take on Things
A9 hijacks the functionality of clicking and dragging a link - it does this in such a way that the link can't be dragged out of the window. So, I can't drag links from the search results and drop them into a specific bookmarks folder, or someplace on my desktop, or onto the tab bar of a browsing window.
"Wow, you're like some kind of superhero able to ward off happiness and success at every turn."
-- Ryan Stiles
Access to http://a9.com/test was blocked.
Forbidden virus (Trojan horse) 'JS/Exploit-DDay' was detected.
Amusing this, because the info I finally found about this DDay is that it only affects IE, and I was using Firebird...I would upgrade to Firefox but every time I've tried to do so it fails to authenticate through our firewall so I stick to what works.