What is 'A9'?

A9 is a new Search Engine from Amazon.

The A9 website claims that they are inventing new ways to take search one step farther and make it more effective. A9 provides powerful features to find information, organize it, and remember it - all in one place. A9.com uses web search and image search results enhanced by Google, Search Inside the Book® results from Amazon.com, reference results from GuruNet, and movies results from IMDb.

A9.com allows you to keep your own notes about any web page and search them; it also recommends new sites and favorite old sites for you to visit. With the A9 Toolbar installed your web browsing history will be saved so you can search through your whole history (and clear items you don?t want kept). A9.com uses your history to recommend new sites, to alert you to new search results, and to let you know the last time you visited a page.

In my (as yet limited) experience of using A9, there are two features that make it different from a search engine such as Google. Firstly, it maintains a history of your searches, so that if you regularly monitor the web for the same thing, then you can re-execute the same query without typing the search string again. Secondly, it clearly presents different types of results: web pages, books, images, movies, and so forth. These results are presented together on the same page, which is a simple yet effective idea, giving the results more than ever the feel of an encyclopaedia.

I will be interested to see how popular A9.com will be, and how much market share it can take from Google.

Try A9 for yourself by going to www.a9.com.

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