Comments on: Adios, A9, and Let's Hope Alexa Doesn't Follow

By: Simon

Simon — Sat, 07 Oct 2006 16:14:56 +0000

I don't think it was ever promoted well enough.

I never read anything about it being a major search engine alternative.

Amazon and alexa on their sites never seemed to really push it out front, it was always an after thought and was treated as such.

By: megamasterclass

megamasterclass — Fri, 06 Oct 2006 22:51:41 +0000

well … yeah sometimes its just too hard to beat the big 3 – probably ‘coz you never gain that reqd momentum to start rolling big!

By: Alan

Alan — Fri, 06 Oct 2006 17:03:18 +0000

Its a shame the pictures of storefronts is going away. I can see why it might be tough to cost justify that, but it sure was a great feature. Something about seeing the storefront picture of a local coffee shop gives you a great feel for it. Of course, shots of every Starbucks on the planet is a lot of data for images that probably are pretty darn near identical.

By: Gopi

Gopi — Wed, 04 Oct 2006 17:42:29 +0000

Was A9 just a meta search engine on top of Google (now MSN Live) results with just some cosmetic features…IMO there is really no USP for a average searcher to go there.

By: Top Affiliates

Top Affiliates — Wed, 04 Oct 2006 16:50:25 +0000

Well, it’s sad to see that with just few key members of a team switching to competitors can kill a good product. I saw the new look and feel. It still has the promise. I could see some extra features which are not in live search – for example – the ‘site info’ button – just roll over it and you can see info about site such as alexa rank, inbound links, speed, age etc – all at one place.

By: dumbfounder

dumbfounder — Wed, 04 Oct 2006 14:34:59 +0000

The problem is they don’t offer anything that someone else couldn’t duplicate with a few weeks of work.

By: Shiotsu

Shiotsu — Wed, 04 Oct 2006 14:25:53 +0000

The new search engine sandbox by Google at Searchmash.com however has the feel of old A9 !

By: Dave

Dave — Wed, 04 Oct 2006 00:35:34 +0000

Did someone say Roll Your Own?

By: Kevin

Kevin — Tue, 03 Oct 2006 23:46:25 +0000

Oh, sorry, I see their post. Killing blockview is ridiculous, I often checked it when I would head into the city. I hope they don’t toss the data…

By: Kevin

Kevin — Tue, 03 Oct 2006 23:44:14 +0000

Well, I just went to a9.com and there is a different UI than when I was there 2-3 weeks ago, so not all is lost. Also, they continue to have a searchbar on all Amazon pages. Also, they recently switched to Windows Live search, instead of Google, so they obviously think about (and make deals for) a9.