Thursday, April 15, 2004

Amazon A9 search engine: The Net is getting less boring - or NOT?

A9.com Search: American politics was famously corrupt in the Gilded Age jfaughnan

A9 is Amazon's new search engine. It's very much influenced by Google, with some interesting touches. One can login, and thereby, I assume, ensure that Amazon knows ABSOLUTELY everything about one. Of course I signed in, based on the recommendations Amazon sends me they don't have a clue who I am anyway.

I tested by searching on a string in a quite recent blog post along with my "jfaughnan" universal semi-unique ID string. A9 had indeed indexed it. Very impressive.

Nice to have some competition. Between RSS feeds, Blogs, search innovations and GMail the net is getting less boring again. It got pretty darned dull between 1996 and 2003.
UPDATE: They are actually licensing Google's search engine! No wonder they returned blogspot searches well.

So this is technically much less interesting, but politically fascinating. Google and Amazon were rumored to be lethal enemies. Are they joining forces in anticipation of Redmond's attack?

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