Google gets Bamboozled - Amazon’s Search Engine is Now Live!
Apr 14, 2004 Search and SEO
Whoever said 2004 was the year of search may be right. It has been known that Amazon.com was working on a search engine “project” for the past few months. They launched their new company and beta service today at a9.com. Through a partnership (Translation: “We’ll use you’re existing API until we don’t need you anymore”) with Google, a9 is combining Google search results with Amazon Search Inside the Book(TM) and their Alexa.com results. This is what everyone expected. But the curveballs that Amazon throws at the Search Industry are some new usability features and a toolbar with so much information to offer that it may as well be it’s own browser. A couple of caveats: you sacrifice a lot of personal information to use most of the best features of a9, only an IE toolbar is available, and rollover features (like “Site Info”) are only available in IE as well. Guess those of us Privacy Advocates that use Mozilla/FireFox/Opera/etc are out of luck.
a9’s quiet marketing approach is also interesting. Instead of announcing the service through thousands of Press Releases and a coinciding marketing campaign (Amazon doesn’t have a marketing budget BTW), they relased the news to one blogger, John Battelle, and let the news grow from there. It’s nice to see a blogger get a break like this:
I saw it last month (caveat: unbeknownst to me until recently, Amazon targeted me as their conduit to break this news - I think they wanted it to move from the blogosphere out, as opposed the WSJ in) and had to keep the damn thing to myself, it was hard…
Search Engine craze is going to be an interesting ride this year. All I can say at this point is 2004 is going to be 1996 all over
again.
April 20th, 2004 at 1:54 pm
I think A9 is very interesting but the search space is such that they are not likely to get so far as the general-purpose search engine they are right now. At the very least, I would say they are getting to test some concepts that would backfire if tried by other search engines. I predict that the industry would learn a lot from A9, but eventually they might need to be folded into another company (Amazon.com?)
April 22nd, 2004 at 7:37 pm
I don’t really like A9. The colors and the ui still need some work. It’s very boring.
Sometime last year, I read A9 was going to be a shopping search engine. For shopping and prices, I still prefer using shopping sites like http://www.priceflo.com, they are much more useful.
April 23rd, 2004 at 2:20 pm
Suen, you’re right. The industry could benefit from some usability case-studies (such as a9). Who knows though, Amazon isn’t likely to back out of a project.
Johnny - this looks like comment spam. I normally would delete this, or at least edit the link out, but priceflo actually looks like a decent site and i’m in a good mood today. Enjoy the free link!