A9.com

A9.com is a subsidiary of Amazon.com based in Palo Alto, California that develops search engine technology. A9 currently has over 100 employees in its Palo Alto, Bangalore, and Dublin offices.

A9 has worked in 3 areas over the years.

• The Amazon Product Search department was moved to A9 in 2003.
• ClickRiver is an advertising program for service providers.
• As a research facility in many areas of search, the a9.com website teams have come out with innovations such as OpenSearch.

Product Search

A9 Product Search is responsible for the search engine driving the shopping experience for Amazon.com and its partners. Sites such as Target, Marks & Spencers and Endless also use the same platform. The search engine serves the search boxes, the category browsing experience, searching within books, and the Look Inside feature of searching through pages.

Clickriver Ads

Clickriver is a portal that allows advertisers to easily advertise on Amazon.com. The interface is similar to Google's AdWords.

A9.com Website

A9.com, which went live on April 14, 2004, is an Internet search engine from Amazon.com. Its results derive from Bing (formerly known as "Live Search"), supplemented by Alexa, Amazon.com, and other engines for specific search types.

A9 has many features which many popular search engines lack. In addition to generic web searching, A9 has the ability to search the book results from Amazon.com that include "Search Inside the Book" (as long as a user registers with Amazon.com). Its interface allows users to combine search results together, allowing side by side comparison of results.

A9.com makes use of various search engines for specific uses:

• Live Search performs general web and news searching (from April 14, 2004 to April 30, 2006 Google performed general web and image searching)
• Alexa provides "site info" for general web searches
• Amazon.com Product Search offers "Search Inside the Book"
• Answers.com looks up reference databases
• Wikipedia (via Answers.com) for encyclopedia entries
• Zoominfo for people summaries
• IceRocket blog search
• The Internet Movie Database offers movie searching

Over 400 additional search services can be added.

The release of A9 was met with some controversy, since it records all of a user's searches and links them to the person's Amazon.com account. A9's privacy statement says:

"We may, from time-to-time, employ other companies and individuals to perform functions on our behalf. Examples include sending e-mail and analyzing data. They have access to personal information needed to perform their functions, but may not use it for other purposes."

Some have speculated that A9.com will use data mining for targeted advertising (similar to Gmail). People worried about their privacy can use Generic A9, which does not record personal information.

In January 2005, A9.com added its "BlockView" feature to the Yellow Pages and Maps searches, allowing users to view photos of businesses on many streets in over 24 major U.S. cities after searching for a business name in that city (as of January 2006). Users can also scroll up and down the street view (i.e., up and down the block, hence the name of the feature) in order to see images of other nearby businesses and the areas surrounding them. A9.com planned to continually add new images from a large number of U.S. cities, however the company is no longer offering BlockView to the public.

Service cutback

On September 29, 2006 Amazon discontinued several of the components of A9, including A9 Instant Reward, the A9 Toolbar, A9 Yellow Pages, A9 Maps (including Block View), as well as all other personalization features including the diary, bookmarks, and history.

As a result of the cutback the support for OpenSearch was moved to a community process at OpenSearch.org.

See also

• List of search engines
• David L. Tennenhouse, CEO, February 2006 to September 2006

External links

• A9.com
• ClickRiver
• Amazon.com
• Discussion and review of the new search engine
• Discussion of privacy concerns with A9
• Patent for including an unformatted search string after the domain part of a URL