A9: Amazon’s Search Engine

A9.com Home Page

Is this insidious or what?

Amazon wants to help you search. They’ve taken Google results, combined them with their own searchable content, plus Alexa content, and they let you search through a new, somewhat annoying vertical interface for web info, images, books, movies and other info.

Some of the look of it is pretty cool – like resizing columns and adding/removing search catalogs quickly and easily.

The idea behind it is sinfully easy as well – they’ll remember your searches for you, when you searched, what you found, what you visisted.

It’s a marketer’s dream. Now Amazon can cross-sell you products you want based on information you want.

I’ll probably not be using it very much – just like I don’t use my GMail account very much. Both are novel in their approaches, and thus genuinely useful compared to past options… but that ease of use invites way more usable knowledge about me than I want to give out.