Interesting New Search Engine - A9.com
Okay, so it’s really not that new - Amazon.com has been pushing A9 for a few months now, but I’ve been so happy with Google I’ve not felt a need to sniff around another search engine.
But then I started checking out web sites listed in an article in the April 2005 issue of entitled The Great Giveaway (subscription required) about how eBay, Amazon, and Google are letting companies use their data in remarkable new ways.
Well, A9 was one of the sites listed as using Google’s data, as well as that from Alexa Web Crawl, Guru.net, IMDB, and more, in order to to provide search resorts in a novel form.
In particular, there’s a neat feature where you can click on a Site Info button for a search result and get information about the popularity of the site, what other sites people have looked at when looking at that site, and the response time of the site (note that for lightly trafficked sites, this information is not available).
In parallel to text results, A9 also produces thumbnails of images related to the search term - that was a bit eerie though - I searched on my own name and found dozens of images of my art, a photo of me, some of my photography, and a photo of myself with my wife and our gallery partner Avy.
In any event, the result rankings are pretty good, and the additional site information might helpful in doing research on related topics - the images are an added bonus.
A9 is owned by Amazon.com, incidentally.
I give the A9 search engine a 9.0 out of 10.0 on The Richter Scale.
