A9 Offers Search Results From Five Sources

A9, the search engine from Amazon.com, has relaunched its search engine. It now offers search results from several different sources, including the IMDB and of course, Amazon.com. It's available at http://www.a9.com .

I decided to search for Duke Ellington. "Duke Ellington" brought about 156,000 results (less than half the results the same search brings at Google. So note while the A9 search may be Enhanced by Google, it ain't the same as Google.) There are display switches on the right to open new panels of search results. Panels are available for book results (which adds another panel of search results, this time from Amazon), image results ("enhanced by Google" again), the IMDB (Internet Movie Database), and a reference page powered by GuruNet. I was able to open all these panels and have them be fairly readable, but I have a large screen.

(Note: Reader PD sent me a note that a couple of innocuous searches found pronographik results on the images search. Be sure to turn the filter on using the advanced search. You can find screen shots with examples of his search at dotcomicide.com/2004/09/amazons-a9com-search-showing-adult.html , but they're not safe for work.)

You can have any combination of the panels open; you don't have to look at all of them at once. You'll notice that there are some other switches on the right. History, if you're signed in, shows your search history. Bookmarks, if you're signed in, shows your list of bookmarks. And Diary gives you the option to take notes and annotate pages.

In addition to all this, A9 also offers a toolbar (requires both IE 5.5 and an Amazon account) and a Discover feature, where URLs are suggested to you based on your searching and browsing history. I like the panel implementation; I think it works well. I'd like to see Amazon take more advantage of its own content, offering more than just material from inside books, for example. And a news search panel would go really nicely here. Worth a look.

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