A9
OK I lied, I do have something to write about. Jeez, post an article saying how you are tired of writing, then write a few emails and all of a sudden I’m a prolific weblogger again. What the hell.
Looking through my referrer logs I noticed someone had come from “http://a9.com/dooce”:http://a9.com/dooce - I took a peek and it looked like any other search page and promptly ignored it. Of course if I would have scrolled down to the bottom of the page I would have seen that A9 is Amazon’s new search technology. Fortunately Anil “clued”:http://www.dashes.com/links/archives/20040411.php#012857 me in.
Results seem pretty similar to Google’s - in fact most of the ones I compared my position on some keywords was exactly the same in both. [Updated - as "pointed out":http://battellemedia.com/archives/000575.php by John Battelle A9 is in fact using Google's search results, so my observation would be spot-on.] As you might expect given they own Alexa, A9 includes a Site Info link for each result that points to the Alexa page for the site, like mine. Well at least the results are similar for pages that are in the index, however I have noticed that slightly more esoteric searches that still result in hits in Google return nothing in A9.
They also provide a very nice and unobtrusive sidebar that can be easily hidden (is hidden by default too) that shows related book links and another that shows your search history should you choose to register.
All in all seems worth keeping on eye on anyway. Still not convinced anyone is going to take my daily searching away from Google. Niche search engines like Feedster will do it occasionally but something like A9 that is vying for it all are going to have their work cut out for them.
