Sunday, February 20, 2005

A9.com

Amazon.com started a division a few years ago, and developed something called A9.com. It's sort of a search tool, but it actually uses Google for it's web and image searching.

For me, A9.com is great for keeping my bookmarks and history in one place, even though I might be using different computers. By using A9.com on a regular basis, I can switch from my home computer, work computer, or even a public computer at an internet cafe -- and have full access to my bookmarks and search history.

The Amazon.com part of it is the quick ability to search through books and movies. So, if you tend to search for items like this anyway, you can search the web, images, books, etc. all at once, showing multiple search hits from each source.

I like A9.com quite a lot, and they have a really nice toolbar for Firefox, if you use that browser. Occasionally, I get an error message on a search, something about "page can not be shown" or something. This surprises me, in that it seems to be a lack of power on the server side of thing, something I assume Amazon.com knows quite a bit about. In other words, it seems like they don't have quite enough server power, although it may have something to do with their Google interface, I don't know.

The down side to A9.com is that you need to log into Amazon.com, and now the biggest online retailer will also have your bookmarks and search history. I don't worry about this too much, as Amazon.com already knows a lot about the books, music, and movies that I like to buy. I just have to trust that they never do anything "evil" with that data.

Give A9.com a try, to see for yourself. I think this kind of functionality will eventually be in Google and other search sites, so it's good to look at what Amazon.com is doing. And, it's even nicer with the Firefox toolbar.

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