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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."
Images (provided by Google), Movies (provided by IMDB), and Reference (provided by GuruNet).
Google also gets 50% of the revenue A9 makes from its text ads.
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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.
CB#
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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.
*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.
#hostfile 0.0.0.0 primidi.com 0.0.0.0 www.primidi.com 0.0.0.0 radio.weblogs.com
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 think if the results are provided by 3rd parties (such as google), they already have the skewing well under way.
"When life gives you lemons, don't make lemonade. Make life take the lemons back!" -- Cave Johnson
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!
search for "Books" returns: Barnes and Noble!
I've just signed legislation that'll outlaw Russia forever. We'll begin bombing in five minutes.
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
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.
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.
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.
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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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.
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