by Bernie Goldbach in The Irish Examiner, October 1, 2004

I started dabbling with Amazon’s A9 search engine a few weeks ago and soon discovered I had earned a 1.5% discount for my Amazon purchases just because I had searched with A9.com-a special offer that Amazon does not advertise. Amazon told me “collecting this discount is zero effort on your part. It will be applied automatically at checkout. We don’t advertise this additional discount that we give in exchange for using A9.com, so if you want your friends to know about it, please tell them.” Now you know.

I got the discount without setting A9.com as my home page. However, I installed the A9 toolbar and use it for around 20 searches a day. Amazon claims that it is sharing click-through revenue derived from Google AdWords displayed on A9 search results pages. Nice one. That’s what search engine tracker John Battelle thinks as well. Batelle says A9 “has raised the bar for innovation in search.”

After using A9 for a fortnight, I think it feels as deep as Yahoo and as meaningful as Google. However, I have used elements of A9 (in its Alexa iteration) for more than three years and I have worked with its range of options for some time. They come packaged in ways that help viewers see more about who owns a site and often include reviews of the quality of information and services available through the site.

Built by ex-Yahoo guru Udi Manber, the A9 search engine provides personalised elements in different panes on the same screen. This means you can search images, the worldwide web, IMDB and Amazon in one quick sweep. These results appear in a multi-paned interface. This visual presentation changes the look and feel of search because the results are no longer just a listing of sites. Sure, some panes could show websites, others thumbnails of images, and others, if you choose, can show results from GuruNet and the Internet Movie Database. You activate each pane by pressing a rectangular button on the right side of the page.

When you search with at least two panes open at once, you are in a totally different part of the search engine galaxy than where Google travels. More importantly, A9 weaves Amazon’s recommendation system into its results. So if you ask A9 for “we the media”, queries from visitors who bought the book “We the Media” are also considered relevant. Moreover, A9 keeps track of what you’re looking for, reminds you about which results you used in past queries, watches everyone else’s clicks and gives you feedback about what other people did with the results. All of this information remains behind on the A9 system. While this may unnerve some people you will never have an anonymous search history - it’s a great step forward for those who need to bounce from home computer to lab workstation to laptop to cybercafe to mobile phone. Your A9 clickstream meets you at every juncture.

For me, it has meant being able to use my mobile phone to extract classroom lectures, magazine articles and items published in the Irish Examiner just by knowing the title of the item. I can find this article on my Motorola E398 by browsing to this exact URL: www.a9.com/a9.examin… (full stop must be included in the address).

Down sides do exist to this technology. Anyone using it leaves behind a clickstream that makes marketers drool. If you routinely search for the seedy side of the internet, your search patterns will percolate out when someone mirrors your behaviour. Additionally, your searching links back to an Amazon profile, wishlist, recommendations and activity log. Investigators could have a field day when poring over the resultant clickstream.

Having said that, I was able to spoof the A9 system into thinking I was somebody else. I didn’t know the chap, but somehow my Opera browser’s cookies and this other person’s cookies must be close to the same. That suggests anyone with an ability to manually edit cookies could anonymise themselves while surfing with A9. Doing that will give the Amazon discount to the person you impersonate.

Whether A9 will become the ultimate one-stop search platform depends on a surge of adopters, the durability of the back-end and the marketing of the system. For me, A9 has already proven its strength.