Comments on: Updated: Udi Manber to Leave Amazon's A9 For Google

By: Arthur Davidson Ficke

Arthur Davidson Ficke — Fri, 10 Feb 2006 00:47:40 +0000

Oddly, if you have cookies turned off, you can't even get to A9 from Firefox. When I type "http://www.a9.com" into the address bar, it ratchets back and forth between a9.com and a9.amazon.com, the pops up a dialog box that says:

"Firefox has detected that the server is redirecting the request for this address in a way that will never complete."

This is lame.

A user shouldn't have to have cookies enabled to do a search, but nobody out there seems to have noticed this issue that I'm aware of - which is sort of an indictment of the popularity of A9

By: Yogish Baliga

Yogish Baliga — Thu, 09 Feb 2006 01:12:48 +0000

It is not true that Amazon do not have any sophesticated algoritms.

Amazon's recommendation engine is one of the best I have seen . I always get the best book recommendation as per my previous purchase. Sometimes I have purchased books for my friends. I can remove those books from the recommendation input. That is one of the thing I liked most.

By: Greg Linden

Greg Linden — Wed, 08 Feb 2006 20:07:25 +0000

That's probably unnecessarily harsh, AnonForNow. While at Amazon, Udi drove Amazon's Search Inside the Book feature. That was a pretty big achievement that sparked a lot of interest from the news media. It launched well before Google's competing effort, Google Book Search.

I'm also not sure I agree with your claim that the algorithms in use at Amazon aren't that sophisticated. Amazon is one of the few places doing work with truly massive data sets, tens of millions of customers, millions of items in the catalog. Techniques needed to do interesting data analyses at this scale are not trivial.

It is a bit odd that A9 was built as a shell around Google search. I've also wondered why they did that, especially since Alexa (another Amazon-owned company) already has a pretty extensive web crawl.

By: AnonForNow

AnonForNow — Wed, 08 Feb 2006 19:16:53 +0000

Not really firing, but disentangling while still hoping for something useful. He started as “Chief Algorithms Officer”, then there was not much news, and then he sort of drifted into A9. Most of the algorithms in use at Amazon aren’t that sophisticated anyways, so it’s hard to figure out what the role was. Likewise building A9 as a shell around Google doesn’t speak of a strong IR presence.

By: Greg Linden

Greg Linden — Wed, 08 Feb 2006 16:35:57 +0000

I doubt that, AnonForNow. That would be an absurdly expensive way to fire someone.

By: Microsano

Microsano — Wed, 08 Feb 2006 11:08:23 +0000

Congratulations to udi , this is a good news for google , all the “brains” go to google…

By: AnonForNow

AnonForNow — Wed, 08 Feb 2006 04:50:09 +0000

I never “got” A9, even after interviewing there and talking to others who have. My best guess: an excuse for Bezos to ease Manber out of Seattle.

By: isb

isb — Wed, 08 Feb 2006 04:00:11 +0000

Congratulations to udi, but this is also very troubling news. Since Google has a lot of smart people, according to the “A people hire A people” principle, all the smartest people will soon be working at Google. How can anybody compete with that kind of talent pool? Google is actually monopolizing intellectual capital – I don’t know how I feel about that.