Slashdot Mirror
A9 Search Engine Launches Yellow Pages
vmalik writes "The A9 search engine has launched a Yellow Pages service, and the listings in major cities include photographs of the storefronts. The site also contains information on how they did it. It seems to be pretty good with lots of store images and driving information from MapQuest."
Cool idea, and keeping this up-to-date will be a nice little earner for someone. Presumably, photographed stores will tell A9 when things have changed... or will there be a two year delay?
Did he inhale?
A9 is like Google and Claria combined, with webbugs, click tracking and paid inserts all tied to your Amazon cookie which is tied to your credit card
it only exists to maximise Amazon and their partners (those who pay the most) revenue
at work we classify A9 as a "severe privacy threat" and therefore it is blocked at the firewall
It looks like they kind of botched it. I'm not surprised, given the lag and inaccuracy of GPS in an urban environment (tall buildings = imperfect coverage) and the overall insanity of the whole project.
Basically I searched for some things in New York, and got some cool images. Not once was I looking at the actual storefront I asked for. Once, I was able to find the store by moving left two images down the block (a neat feature) but the next time I searched, I was not even on the same block with the restaurant I was looking for. Next search, there was a giant truck in front of the store I wanted. Woo!
It is really entertaining to walk up and down the block and take a look at all the poor slobs who A9 caught scratching themselves on some streetcorner. I wonder when we can count on the first lawsuit?
Justin
"Why would God give us a waist if we wasn't supposed to rest our pants on it?" - Rev. Roy McDaniels
If you are on a public street, then there is no expectation of privacy. If you don't have a sign displaying your name, then it's a bit hard to map the image to you unless you're listed in the yellow pages, which in that case, defeats the idea of privacy.
So short answer, "no".
Hey, how can I search for brothels? That ought to deliver some cool pictures :)
8 of 13 people found this answer helpful. Did you?
I agree, the project is insane. It is inherently inaccurate and unmaintainable in the long term. A9 certainly has some very nice features, my problem with it is that these features slow the whole thing down so much (at least over the lake here is Australia). After being used to the lightning speed of Google I find myself impatient with A9.
Though I do wonder how useful that will ever be.
It's not perfect, and the landscape is constantly changing. How often do they plan to refresh? How will they even do that?
A block in NYC can change dramatically in a year. Kind of hard to keep those pics up to date. Take a building down, put a new one up, or just remove the scafolding, and it looks like a different block.
Just my $0.02, but I think keeping that up to date and useful is going to be nearly impossible.
So I decided to play with it for a moment and see how cool it was. I did a search for a couple restaurants and shops nearby. It didn't have a listing for any of them, with or without photo. So I decided to search for something obvious: Dave and Busters.
:)
The entry came up with a photo and everything, but the photo was wrong. They had the right block but they were off by about half a block. Impressive technological feat to be within half a block, but it makes the technology totally useless.
In the case of D&B, if you scan up the street you can see the big orange and blue awning and find it. But then I knew the street and so knew which direction to scroll when I saw that they were off. So now they combine the sometimes humorous inaccuracy of on-line maps with a new level of inaccuracy using street level photos.
You may be better off asking for directions from a real person
This sig has been temporarily disconnected or is no longer in service