a9.com - Innovations In Search Technologies

a9.com is a wholly owned and operated subsidiary of Amazon.com. A9 helps people find what they want on the world's biggest e-commerce sites. You can search the web or news by live.com, books by Amazon, references by answers.com or wikipedia, movies by imdb, videos, music, song lyrics and much more. There’s a special search tool for looking exclusively on Amazon.com called “A9 Product Search”. The site is very well structured; search results are aggregated according to the chosen sources, but still in the same page, giving a general overview of the main results. An interesting feature is the site information available next to each search result, including for example a list of sites visited by people who visited that specific page. A9 developed the “OpenSearch” technology for search aggregation and any website that has a search feature can make their results available in this format. For businesses interested on online advertising there is a service called “Clickriver Ads” that lets advertisers place sponsored links on Amazon.com.

“A9.com was created because we believe search is vitally important to e-commerce. With A9 Product Search, we power search and browse for the leading online shopping destinations and with Clickriver Ads, we deliver targeted advertisements directly to Amazon.com. Together, these initiatives help people find what they want on the world's leading e-commerce sites.”

A9.com narrows down searches to specific categories and sources. Instead of having to scroll through pages of results, you immediately get the responses you’re looking for. Also, you don’t have to retype your query to look in a different category. It may be the next big thing in product searching.

How would it manage to stand out from the increasing number of search engines and websites that are coming up everyday?