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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."
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.
Visit the Game Programming Wiki!
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"
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
Vivisimo fails the laziness test - ease of typing.
Go ahead and try it:
google.com
yahoo.com
a9.com
vivisimo.com
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