My first visit to A9.com was unimpressive. It appeared to be "just another search engine". I wish I had returned sooner.
For those who don't know, A9 is a search engine created by Amazon.com. They are using Google for most of the searching duties, but hook into other engines when they fit the "mode" like IMDB when you are searching movies. They have personalized results by remembering the searches you have executed in the past (awesome!) and have a good interface for displaying search results for images, books, bookmarks, diary entries, movies and reference material with the primary web results. These will be nifty when the searches are appropriate.
When you "re-execute" a search, the results also keep track of the sites that you have visited already and give you a time frame of when you went there last. I wonder if they will treat the book marks the same way...
Of course everything hooks into Amazon's primary site in some way, so that could get annoying after a while, and all of those privacy whacko's will probably have a problem with Amazon knowing what you search for (which they use to display new sites to you in the "Discover" section). Scott McNealy has it right, there is no such thing as privacy.
For the most part, A9 looks to be a winner and for the next couple of days will be my search engine of choice. The following link will give you a full overview about A9.
Posted by carl at September 19, 2004 11:34 PM
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