A9.com

Amazon has entered the search engine fray with a9.com. It has some interesting features.

The web search is powered by Google. But it includes sites stats that give such things like a traffic rank, number of sites that link to the site, and how fast the website is.

If you sign into Amazon, then it will simultaneously search Amazon's digital library. (Like the "Look Inside The Book" feature that was already on Amazon). It provides a link to an image of the relevant page as well as a brief excerpt with the search term highlighted.

I'm pretty amazed by it. So far I've used it to find recipes and instances where people (one in particular) have said "misunderestimate". I imagine that it would also a good place to find that elusive quotation or book passage.

One other feature is that it will remember what your previous searches were. Depending on your level of paranoi, that is a good thing or a bad thing.

Posted by Mike Waugh at April 21, 2004 01:20 PM