Many have noted the apparent passing (at least in all but domain) of A9, a search site from Amazon that got me and a lot of others very excited when it debuted two years ago with then innovative features like roll your own search and search history. I recall the gleam in Udi Manber’s eyes as he told me about it, and I believed him when he said he had carte blanche to do whatever he wanted in search from Bezos and Amazon. But Manber is at Google now, and A9, apparently, is nearly dead. Too bad.
Adios, A9, and Let’s Hope Alexa Doesn’t Follow
Many have noted the apparent passing (at least in all but domain) of A9, a search site from Amazon that got me and a lot of others very excited when it debuted two years ago with then innovative features like roll your own search and search history. I recall…
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.
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…
Did someone say Roll Your Own? 🙂
The new search engine sandbox by Google at Searchmash.com however has the feel of old A9 !
The problem is they don’t offer anything that someone else couldn’t duplicate with a few weeks of work.
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.
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.
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.
well … yeah sometimes its just too hard to beat the big 3 – probably ‘coz you never gain that reqd momentum to start rolling big!
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.