Peter Griffin: A9.com makes searching personal

COMMENT

I've really taken to A9.com. It's almost as if this new player in the search engine game has been built specifically for me. That's because I spend a fair amount of my online time at two websites in particular - bookseller Amazon and movie trivia website Internet Movie Database. Books and movies are my thing, you see.

So what's prised me away from Google? Only that A9.com uses Google's search engine but gives you an extra set of features that constant web searchers will love.

A9.com will analyse your search engine entries and throw up book references from Amazon and movie references from IMDB that match your searches.

Checking for the latest news from the band U2? The Amazon "pane" of the search engine will produce all the biographies of the band while the IMDB pane will show you all the documentaries and music videos they've released.

It may be that you don't want that information. Fine, close the panes and use the search engine in its minimalist form - as the search engine war heats up, Amazon is going for personalisation.

To be really useful, A9.com requires you to download a toolbar to plug into Windows which will collate your web surfing and searching history and store bookmarked links. You can even jot notes about a site in the "diary" pane, keeping your scribblings for later reference.

"It becomes an extension of your memory," according to A9 boss Udi Manber.

There's another pane called "reference", supplied by GuruNet. I'd never come across GuruNet before, but it's also very clever.

Punch "Stephen King" into the search engine for instance. GuruNet spits out a biography of the famous horror writer. A9 will throw up a collection of images of him. Amazon and IMDB will deliver King-related books and movies respectively, while the general search engine will point to King-themed sites on the web.

All it really needs now is a Bloglines type plug-in giving you feeds from all the sites equipped with rich site summary (RSS) - a format which allows you to amass headlines from hundreds of sources all on one page. Then you'd have a pretty much perfect search engine.

So what's Google doing here? Why isn't it providing this service all on its own? Well, Amazon has become pretty good at personalisation and now is one of the first to really exploit that in search engines. It's also a kingpin in online book and CD sales.

After a few CD searches in Amazon you'll soon be getting lists of "artists" and top 10 critics' choices in the area you are searching. This feature of Amazon has you uncovering authors and bands you'd never have picked up on your own.

I think Google sees Amazon as an intelligent partner and with the two splitting revenue from A9.com advertising, they stand to benefit from each other's strengths. IMDB is owned by Amazon so it's a cosy little partnership.

Take it that Amazon, like Google, will use search engine queries as a basis for market research. The privacy concerns are no less or greater than with using Google.

But it seems than Amazon and Google may be on a collision course. Now a listed company, Google is keen on diversifying. It's already launched goods-finder Froogle. New Zealander Dr Craig Nevill-Manning was a key developer of Froogle, which is a shopper's paradise in that it points surfers to online sources of just about whatever they want.

But Amazon already plays in that space. Froogle's business model depends on being able to sell advertising on Froogle pages and based on the search engine requests of its users. If more people are going to Amazon.com via A9.com, Froogle's ability to do business may be lessened.

Who knows how these two major hitters in the online space will get on in the long term.

Frankly I don't care if they use my search habits to generate advertising leads. A9 is a free and immensely useful tool and well-worth investigating.