Introducing A9.com

 by: Jakob Jelling

In this age of keeping the search engine capabilities clean and providing a less is more approach, Google.com has emerged from virtually out of nowhere to be the leading engine available. People like Google because they aren’t barraged with useless information, flashy banner ads and most of all, annoying pop-up advertisements. People want to get their information fast and without being inundated about the newest car or fad diet. Enter a new player into this domain A9.com.

A9.com was formed and opened in Palo Alto California in October 2003. Branded as a subsidiary of Amazon.com, Inc., A9.com is looking to take over where Google left off. You may be wondering what makes A9.com any better than Google? The answer is that A9.com offers users search results from five separate repositories.

Google.com provides the web and image section and book texts are offered by none other than Amazon.com. Vast libraries of over 120,000 books on the market today are at the users fingertips should they need references. Movie and theatre references are drawn from IMDB.com otherwise known as Internet Movie Database. Gurunet.com provides reference information to this site as well.

What makes A9 interesting is that it captures or snapshots previous searches into memory. As the user searches the web abroad they will continue to build their own history file in case they need to research the information again in the future. A9.com also provides a detailed diary that you can maintain. If you think that Google still may have a stronger hold because of its toolbar capabilities, think again, A9.com has its own toolbar as well. By using the A9.com toolbar, users can retrieve information previously searched quickly and more efficiently.

A9.com’s CEO, Jeff Bezos’ vision on bringing together many technologies to help hone in on the best possible way to search the web for exact and detailed information makes A9.com a strong competitor in the new search engine marketplace.

Some of the robust features available with A9.com are:

• The ability to store a detailed search history to pull information from previous queries. Users can even modify their history files to get the results they are looking for.

• A diary function that allows the user to record and cross-reference information about any web page visited. This feature is integrated with the A9.com toolbar.

• Drag and drop a URL by book marking

• Discover feature that displays information that the user might be interested as well.

As of September 2004, this product is still in Beta testing.

By Jakob Jelling

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