Amazon's A9.com Search Engine Goes Live

scapermoya writes "Today was the official launch day of Amazon's A9.com search engine, which has been in public beta for some time now. It uses results from Google, and adds some personalized features, like bookmarks and search history. Its Java-heavy inteface reminds me of Gmail, which is nice. It doesn't seem like it was designed to supplant Google, but rather to flesh out some things that a certain demographic of people might like."

Comments

Mod parent up

[Anonymous Coward]

It's rather disgusting how people confuse Java and Javascript. THEY ARE NOT THE SAME THING! You're techies, you should know this stuff!

THIS SOUNDS GREAT!!!!

[ferrellcat]

You mean I get to tie ALL of my web searches to a verified identity of myself (Amazon account) complete with credit card and mailing address??? OH BOY!!!!

Re:THIS SOUNDS GREAT!!!!

[janbjurstrom]

Exact same thought. Plus their "Diary" function. Personal thoughts and links tied to an Amazon account (and whatever else), bookmarks, etc. Their "market research division" must be salivating.

Mmmmm...I'm leaning towards 'no-way-in-hell' myself.

so basically....

[SpootFinallyRegister]

...its google repackaged with some amazon ads thrown in and plenty of bloat. gee, where do i sign up?

Skewed results?

[dealsites]

Amazon has one of the best affiliate programs in existance. Anyone with a website can easily sign up with Amazon to make some money off selling items. I wonder if A9 will automagically find sites that have amazon links and rank them higher? It seems like they could help mazimize their revenue that way.
--
The Sunday deals are rolling in, check them out live.

Re:Two problems...

[dollargonzo]

what you are saying doesn't really make sense. how are you picking the content with google any more than a9? doing an image search on google gives the same results (not suprisingly) as a9 images do.

Er...

[herichon]

From their current privacy policy here:

Use of Third Party Service Providers: We may, from time-to-time, employ other companies and individuals to perform functions on our behalf. Examples include sending e-mail and analyzing data. They have access to personal information needed to perform their functions, but may not use it for other purposes.
Business Relationships with Third Parties We Do Not Control: We work closely with some third parties. In some cases, we will include offerings from these businesses on A9.com. In other cases, we may include joint offerings from A9.com and these businesses on A9.com. Click here for examples of co-branded and joint offerings. You can tell when a third party is involved in the offering, and we share customer information related to those transactions with that third party.

My Amazon history + my credit card number + my web searching history (all searches are saved on A9 servers) + Amazon's stated intent to share information with third parties = a little too close to home for me. No thanks, A9... I'll stick with the relative anonymity of Google.

Re:CNET-

[iotaborg]

If you care to do the google image search for "frontpage seo", you will also find that it gets porn. In fact the images are pretty much the same under google's 'moderate filtering' from what you get on A9 (seeing that A9 uses google...)

Re:Two problems...

[baeksu]

So don't play with the interface, sheez... The point is that this is not taking anything away from people who prefer google. It's just something that other people might find more to their liking.

If you love google so much, stick with it. No one is forcing you to use anything else.

Size Matters Folks!

[rainman_bc]

I use google as my home page for a few reasons, but the main one is size; I hate waiting for my browser, and I'm notinto about:blank.

Google's 1.9kb. A9 is 20kb. Doesn't sound like much, but Google just loads faster because of it.

+ 63kb of script library

[Anonymous Coward]

just teh script library is 63k so that page of yours is actually over 100k, couple that with undoubtable datamining going on (looking at their privacy policy and the "save history" function) and this looks like another MSN search engine but dare i say it, worse.
this engine has minor benefit to the user but every benefit to Amazon, it even has the cheek to remind me to put cookies on forcing me to click an "ok" to continue

thanks i will stick to less greedy companies who tend to treat people as people, not as products

Blame NetScape

[dozer]

This confusion is intentional. NetScape's client-side scripting language was originally going to be called LiveScript. A fine name. However, just before shipping it, they decided that they wanted to tie in with Sun's new marketing juggernaut even though, aside from some superficial syntax similarities, the two languages have nothing in common. Hence Java/JavaScript. Pure unadulterated idiocy!! Don't blame clueless users for this one -- this confusion is exactly what NetScape had in mind when they chose the name.

Re:English Anyone?

[Anonymous Coward]

Isn't a question like Isnt that supposed to be " IS" supposed to end with a question mark?

(Let alone include an apostrophe somewhere)

Resist A9!

[comforteagle]

DataLibre

Amazon, or any other one entity, must not own the semantic web:

Applying Distributed XML to The Open Source Paradigm Shift,
DataLibre (was: Resist A9),
& The Future of the Semantic Web is Here Today and is Evenly Distributed

Site Speeds

[toddestan]

Something I discovered is when you click on the "Site Info" button, one of the statistics it gives out is a site's speed. I found this pretty interesting. Amazon.com is listed as "Slow". Microsoft.com is "Very Slow". A9.com is merely "Average", but Google.com is "Fast". Gentoo.org is "Very Fast", so go figure.

The slowest site I could find so far is Tripod.com, in the 4th percentile. The fastest site so far is goat.cx (don't ask) in the 97th percentile.