E-tail giant Amazon is jumping into the search war, with its subsidiary A9.com rolling out what they say will be a "search engine with memory" – giving users the chance to store and edit bookmarks on a central server computer, keep track of each previously-clicked link, and even make personal journal notes on those pages to see when they visit those sites again.
“A9.com gives people an incredible amount of power for discovering information from diverse and comprehensive data sources and managing that information effectively and easily,” Amazon.com founder and chief executive Jeff Bezos said in a formal statement. “The search landscape is evolving at such a rapid pace that we must continue working hard to build innovative technologies that offer a great user experience.”
The original A9 was created by former Yahoo worker and now A9 chief executive Udi Manber, known as a computer scientist and online information retrieval pioneer, who based A9 in part on Google search results and led development of Amazon's search-inside-the-book project. That project, according to some published reports, lets Amazon and A9 visitors search complete contents of over 100,000 books which have been digitally scanned.
“Search has become an integral part of many people’s work,” said Manber. “We strive to extend current search tools by helping people not only discover information easily, but also remember and manage that information.”
The A9 Search History is stored and displayed to users any time they are signed-in either from home or from work, the company said. Users can see and edit their past results and sits they've seen by clicking it in the A9 toolbar or by way of an adjustable column on the main page.
The Diary feature lets users record, save, and make reference notes about any Web page visited, with entries saved automatically and searched easily from A9.com or the toolbar. Users can set bookmarks for favorite sites and see them anywhere, with those links viewable through an adjustable main page column or the toolbar, A9 said.
And, drag-and-drop can be utilized to move any item from search results, bookmarks, and history entries into a bookmark column as well as organizing bookmarks through drag-and-drop, the company added.
Amazon also plans to offer a dialog box letting Amazon site shopping customers use A9 to do Web searches, with company executives telling reporters they have no immediate plans to take on Google or other search engines directly.
But analysts, according to at least two newspaper reports, say Amazon is only too well aware that search engines are takeoff points for e-tail and that there are broader business opportunities to expand more fully into search.
"They've downplayed the idea that they're going into search," SearchEngineWatch.com editor Danny Sullivan told The New York Times. "They say, 'we're not competing.' But at the same time you have to wonder why they're doing it, and it's likely they're doing it because they see some potential in search."
Manber may have implied as much himself. "This is a big area," he told the San Francisco Chronicle. "There's a lot of room for other people."
