October 03, 2006 | Tuesday

Amazon’s A9 gets a facelift

By Richard Gregory - COO in Events |Latitude Intelligence Network |Search Engines |Microsoft

Attendees of our previous Intelligence Network events will have heard our CEO, Dylan Thwaites, praise the alternative approach of Amazon’s search engine - A9 - in an attempt to encourage people to explore a wider variety of search engines.

Like all search home pages, the new A9 home page is much cleaner and more appealing. There is a real “me too” approach being taken by all the search engines here...simply look at the following search home pages to get my drift:

www.google.co.uk
search.msn.co.uk
search.yahoo.co.uk
search.aol.com

The only one that looks slightly different is the butler-less search.ask.com

While the new facelift removes some of the more “novelty” elements of the A9 system (Instant Reward Program, BlockView etc) it still maintains the multiple results layout that allows you to compare MSN results, alongside Wikipedia results and a variety of other search “groups” you can choose to set-up. I tend to include flickr and infozoom’s people search to my mix.

A9 looks to be moving ahead in to the ”Roll Your Own Search Engine” Space by letting people further refine the kind of results they want to see.

So...how long until we start to see “people who searched for X also searched for Y”?