SES Chicago - December 7-11, 2009

March 8, 2007

Is Amazon Hedging Search Engine Bets?

The lure of the search dollars seems to haunt Amazon. They have used a few of them over the years, even created a short-lived one of their own. Now they seem to be hedging their bets and have given venture capital to Jimmy Wales' Wikia.

Wales told Reuters that he plans on challenging Google and Yahoo with his Wikia engine. The company recently received $4 million dollars from angel investors and a 'very large amount' from Amazon.

Amazon now uses Microsoft's Live search results at A9.com.

Wales told Reuters that "collaborative search technology could transform the power structure of the Internet' away from the closed 'black box' methods of Google, Yahoo and Microsoft.

Posted by Frank Watson at 10:54 AM | Permalink

November 2, 2006

ClickRiver New Pay Per Click Program from Amazon

Ever wanted to put your ads right on the product page of your competitor's product at Amazon.com, or wanted your product advertised with something related to it? Now with Amazon's new pay per click program ClickRiver, now you can. The program is in beta at the moment and through Amazon's A9 department.

You can find out more about the program here and apply to participate in the beta at ClickRiver.com

Posted by Jennifer Slegg at 10:02 AM | Permalink

October 6, 2006

Honda's New 'Crave' Campaign Missing Search?

Honda has redesigned its bestselling CRV sport utility vehicle. There's a snazzy flash-based site featuring the new car and a user-generated/social media component there too. People can post their "craves."

But this otherwise sophisticated campaign, which includes outdoor and other traditional media, is apparently missing search.

One of the things you'd have thought that marketers learned over the past 12-24 months is the centrality of search in the consumer product research experience. Here's Chris Sherman's Search Day piece on comScore research that shows the importance of search in the car-buying process.

What typically happens with consumers is that they are made aware of something via word of mouth or traditional offline media and then they go to a search engine to find out more information or otherwise conduct research.

That's exactly what I did. I was having lunch at Yahoo! yesterday and driving back to my office saw a billboard that featured the new Honda and simply the word "Crave."

What did I do when I got back? I went to a search engine and plugged in the word "Crave." (I didn't know that Honda was the maker of the car so I didn't go straight to the Honda site.) Here are the results of that search on Google, Yahoo, Windows Live: nothing, nothing and nothing.

How foolish is that?

Now, let's talk about price. The term "SUV" (according to Yahoo) is worth $5.03 per click. Both Ford and Honda are bidding that same amount. Given that they're competing at that price they're probably paying it too. By contrast, the top bid for the term "Crave" is $.20.

One of the things that traditional media can do is create demand (or more precisely search inventory) for terms that are unique or cheaper to buy.

I should have been able to plug in "Crave" and see a paid add for the new Honda CRV and been taken to their cool new interactive site. But because Honda's agency doesn't fully understand consumer behavior it's missing an important campaign component and an opportunity to build awareness of the new redesign very cheaply.

Bad agency. Time to put the account up for review?

Postscript: I was informed by AdWeek that RPA is Honda's general interactive agency. These guys are very smart and won Yahoo's first "Searchlight Award" based on their integration of search into an overall campaign. I was a panelist at that event and was very impressed with their work.

If the information is correct and RPA is handling the new "Crave" campaign online, my question remains: why aren't they buying a word so central to the campaign?

Postscript 2 - Mike Margolin responds in detail to this post below:

Wow, Greg, ouch. Initially, I'm a bit disappointed that the SEW Blog apparently doesn't allow comments to posts. I've long held the belief the blogging is meant to be a two-way medium and that it's important to give readers a voice. The only thing that I can imagine is that, in an effort to control the sheer amount of opinions that might be generated on any given topic, SEW decided to disable this function.

So about the campaign. You are correct that we (at this early stage) made the oversight and forgot to include the keyword, “crave”. Frankly, I'm a little surprised that we did, considering the amount of keyword brainstorming that was done to support the central theme of the campaign (more on that below). I even recall a specific conversation that we had with one of the search networks where we talked about copy strategy for the keyword. I'll liken the omission to turning over every book and pillow in your house looking for your sunglasses, but realizing that, d'oh, they were in your jacket pocket all along. Thanks to your suggestion, we'll add the keyword to the campaign today. But I won't lose too much sleep over the missed opportunity as here's what we've actually done with this campaign so far:

Earlier in the year, shortly after the “CRaVe” creative concept was approved, we went to work on the on the website and marketing strategy. Right off the bat, we felt that search marketing (both search and content-targeting) could play a big role in driving visits from the right psychographic profile to an experiential site leveraging user-generated content. In fact, our search marketing team actually had a big voice in web site strategy meetings, explaining how the site would need to function in order to make the best use of cost-effective search traffic. And when all was said and done, we developed a strategy that targeted thousands of non-automotive keywords which could easily be turned into craves. For example, one of the initial site users uploaded “celebrity gossip” as something that she craves. Well, now when someone searches “celebrity” gossip on Yahoo!, they now see this ad:

Crave Celebrity Gossip? Tell us what else you crave and see what others are craving. crave.honda.com

And when someone searches for yakitori (which, BTW, is one of the things that I crave as well), we show this ad:

Do You Crave Yakitori? Where can you find the best? Tell us or see where others go. crave.honda.com

All told, there are thousands of crave-related keywords in the campaign, ranging from “ice cream” and “barbecue ribs” to “Labradors” and “surfing”. And while the search portion of Yahoo! Search Marketing's campaign has been very important, Google's content targeting has been even more valuable. The result: a combination of these crave-related keywords and SUV category keywords have already generated nearly œ of a million visits to the crave.honda.com site (it should be noted that that the total number of searches on the keyword “crave” across the Yahoo! network during the prior month was a whopping 9,750 – that's roughly the same amount of people searching for “banana split”). And because of the breadth of words which can be spun into the “crave” concept and how valuable those keywords have been to this initiative, the average CPC of our campaign has ended up being a very, very small fraction of the $5.00 CPC that you pointed out in your blog post. That's the problem with scrutinizing search marketing initiatives from the outside; not every campaign strategy will be immediately apparent, mainly because of the purchasing/placement models with Google and Yahoo! across both search and content properties. It's just not always as simple as searching on a couple keywords and determining whether the campaign was a rousing success or a miserable failure.

And frankly, while I hope I'm wrong, I just don't see a ton of people outside of the search marketing world seeing a CRaVe-themed billboard for the new Honda CR-V and then typing “crave” into their search engine to look for more on the theme or the vehicle. Google Trends shows virtually no lift in search volume for that keyword since the campaign began, which suggests that the 9,750 number above isn't likely to change much. The lift on “2007 Honda CRV” is much more interesting. If people are intrigued enough to carry their interest from an outdoor ad or TV spot over to a search engine, they'll more likely search for “Honda CRV” or even ”Honda Crave” (and we have highly visible SE presence for both).

Was it an oversight to not get covered off on this keyword? Yep. And I'm a bit chafed at myself for missing such an obvious word. But was it a missed opportunity to the extent that we're “stupid”, a “Bad agency” and worthy of Honda putting the account “up for review”? I just don't think so. We might've missed out on a couple thousand clicks to the site. But not for much longer.

Postscript From Danny: Comments are very welcomed. We have a How To Comment link in our left-hand navigation that explains that discusison happens in our Search Engine Watch Forums, so we aren't having discussions run in two different places. I'll look to make that link perhaps more prominent under posts themselves, in the future.

Posted by Greg Sterling at 9:09 AM | Permalink

October 2, 2006

Amazon's A9 Becomes, Well, Sort Of Nothing

Amazon's A9 saw the loss of its driving force Udi Manber to Google earlier this year. Now two years after its launch, A9 itself has lost virtually all of its  many of its distinguishing features, according to an update from the company, including:

BlockView? They've killed BlockView? It was the best thing A9 had going for it. Of course, none of these features have helped A9 succeed as a search service. It's gone nowhere, as my A9's Low Popularity & Slower Growth post from earlier this year covers.

Frankly, A9's always felt like some type of Amazon plaything, a way for Amazon to say they were in search but also pretend it was all just an experiment, if it failed to succeed. I think the failure is now apparent, and Amazon seems to be cutting its losses pretty dramatically.

Microsoft's Windows Live search engine continues to power searches at Amazon, as it has since May. Pandia takes a closer look at what's left  in Amazon's A9 search engine redesigned.

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 9:39 AM | Permalink

May 23, 2006

New Amazon Online Reader For Digital Book Reading

Gary Price has a detailed & step-by-step write up on the new Amazon Online Reader. You can view the new look for the reader by clicking here. The new features include; search for words within the pages, scroll from page to page (looks AJAX like), and a zoom feature. More details at Gary and/or at Amazon.

Posted by Barry Schwartz at 9:41 AM | Permalink

May 3, 2006

Nearly 10 Percent Of Amazon Visitors Clicked Off To Google

Yesterday, I wrote about how Amazon had ended its relationship with Google and why not being in Amazon -- rather than Amazon-owned A9 -- was potentially the bigger issue for Google. Now in Google, Amazon and MSN, Bill Tancer over at Hitwise provides some stats detailing how Amazon, rather than A9, drove more "downstream" traffic to Google.

Bill's stats show how nearly 10 percent of all departures from Amazon went to Google, compared to only 2 percent of all departures from A9 going to Google. Also keep in mind that Amazon's traffic -- though not shown -- is certainly much larger than A9's traffic. Not only is the percentage larger, but the sheer volume of people is bigger too.

Want to comment or discuss? Visit our SEW Forums thread, Amazon Ditches Google For Microsoft.

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 7:14 AM | Permalink

May 2, 2006

More On Amazon Dumping Google & Missing Paid Listings

Barry noted yesterday that Amazon's A9 was no longer carrying Google results. More important, this means that Amazon itself no longer carries Google's search results -- and in particular, Google's paid listings.

Google and Amazon partnered back in 2003 for Amazon to offer Google searches on the Amazon site. Google ads also were displayed there. I'm pretty sure at one point, the Google logo was on Amazon's home page, along with a search box. Unfortunately, the Internet Archive simply serves up pages from 2000 no matter what links I try from the years 2003 through 2005 to check on this.

Anyway, these days, there's a small A9 Web Search box in the upper right-hand corner of the Amazon site. Until last week, that box brought back A9 results that were powered by Google. Now they are powered by Microsoft's Windows Live Search.

Few people use A9 -- but many more use Amazon. How many did web searches at Amazon is unclear, but in either place, they are no longer seeing the paid listings that Google also used to provide.

In addition, I'm also pretty certain that an ordinary Amazon search (which lots and lots of people do) used to bring up Google paid listings as part of Amazon search results. Today, I don't see these at all. Over at Threadwatch, others report not seeing these either.

MSN syndicates Search to Amazon from the Seattle Post-Intelligencer has more on the new Amazon-Microsoft agreement. The issue of who is providing paid listings isn't covered, but since the Amazon-Google agreement wasn't renewed, I'd assume these are to come from Microsoft.

Amazon Search Finds Microsoft from the Washington Post also has some details on the move, including the inspiring answer to whether Amazon felt Microsoft was providing better search results: "It will be up to users to try that out." So more a business move than a relevancy issue, fair to say :)

Want to comment or discuss? Visit our SEW Forums thread, Amazon Ditches Google For Microsoft.

Want to comment or discuss? Visit our SEW Forums thread, Amazon Ditches Google For Microsoft.

Postscript: See also Nearly 10 Percent Of Amazon Visitors Clicked Off To Google.

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 10:15 AM | Permalink

May 1, 2006

Alexa & A9 Drop Google for Windows Live Search

Garrett French reports that both Alexa Amazon's A9 have switched from being powered by Google Search to Microsoft's Windows Live Search. When did this exactly happen? We are not sure. But it must have been recent. Why has there not been a lot of press on this? Again, I am not sure.

Want to comment or discuss? Visit our SEW Forums thread, Amazon Ditches Google For Microsoft.

Postscript: See also our follow-up post: More On Amazon Dumping Google & Missing Paid Listings.

Posted by Barry Schwartz at 8:44 AM | Permalink

February 7, 2006

Udi Manber Leaves A9 to Join Google

Searchblog reports that Udi Manber, formerly the person in charge at A9 (Amazon.com's search site) is heading to the Googleplex where he'll now work. No word on what Manber's title will be at Google. Amazon/A9 is replacing Manber with Dr. David Tennenhouse, who will take over as A9's Chief Executive Officer.

From the Amazon.com news release: [Tennenhouse] joins A9.com from Intel Corporation where he served as Vice President of the Corporate Technology Group and Director of Research. In addition to building Intel Research, he developed Intel's proactive computing vision, drove several Intel Capital Investments and laid the technical ground work for its new Digital Health Group. Prior to joining Intel, Tennenhouse was Director of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) Information Technology Office where he guided programs in several areas, including search, datamining, information management, machine learning and distributed computing. Additionally, Tennenhouse held positions at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, and the Sloan School of Management.

We've blogged or mentioned several items about Manber since he's been at A9 including:

+ Report from PC Forum Search Panel Manber tells the audience, "In general, people will learn to use search better but have to invest the thinking--we are not in the mind reading business."

+ Search as a Platform, Where is it Going: a Web 2.0 Panel (via Zawodny)

+ Webcast: A9's Udi Manber speaks at the University of Washington, 2004

+ Battelle Interviews Udi Manber for Business 2.0

In recent months Google has hired several big Internet names including Vin Cerf and Louis Monier. Meanwhile, Yahoo is now the workplace of Andrei Broder and Ricardo Baeza-Yates.

Amazon's A9 launched in September 2004. A little over a year ago A9 made news when the bfean offering egan offering "block view" or street level imagery for several large U.S. cities.

Last March, A9 began their OpenSearch initiative allowing webmasters and site owners the chance to add their own search buttons or columns to the A9 service.

Postscript From Danny:

Short AP story here, slightly longer Seattle PI story here.

Postscript From Barry:

Looks like not only the CEO left, but also the CTO. Greg Linden reports that A9's CTO, Ruben Ortega, has also left A9. When Greg asked him why he left, he stated family reasons. But he also did add, "I was quite surprised by the news of Udi leaving. I knew we were doing executive level recruiting, but I was under the impression we were looking for my replacement, not Udi's."

Posted by Gary Price at 5:49 PM | Permalink

February 3, 2006

A9's Low Popularity & Slower Growth

NetRatings sent out some Amazon stats in advance of their earnings report. Interesting to me was a breakout on A9. It shows growth from the fourth quarter of 2004 to the same period of 2005. However, growth from the third to the fourth quarter of 2005 is nowhere near as much as Amazon itself or the Amazon-owned Internet Movie Database. Traffic to both those sites is much higher than A9:

Monthly Unique Audience, In Millions, Q4 2004 Vs. Q4 2005

Site Q4 2004 Q4 2005 Change Amazon 37,323 43,183 16% IMDb 10,717 16,394 53% A9 792 1,369 73%

Monthly Unique Audience, In Millions, Q3 2004 Vs. Q4 2005

Site Q3 2005 Q4 2005 Change Amazon 36,339 43,183 19% IMDb 13,794 16,394 19% A9 1,282 1,369 7%

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 10:01 AM | Permalink

January 17, 2006

A9 Selects ZoomInfo to Power People Search

We've learned that vertical search engine ZoomInfo has been selected to power the "people search" function on A9. If you want to check it out, look for a check/tick box on the A9 home page labeled "People." Much more about ZoomInfo in this overview for SearchDay from December.

Posted by Gary Price at 10:56 AM | Permalink

December 27, 2005

Sharing The Search Wealth At A9, MSN & The Drawbacks

In my post-Christmas mailbox was a message from A9 reminding me of its A9 Instant Rewards program that effectively pays me a bit to search with them. That was a perfect hook to revisit the entire "pay to search" idea that Microsoft chairman Bill Gates kicked off earlier this month.

Let's dive in on Microsoft first. Microsoft May Give Consumers A Share in Advertising Revenue from the Wall Street Journal covers how Gates suggested the idea that it might share ad revenues with searchers as part of a presentation he gave in India. Said Gates:

The user essentially will get paid, either money or free content or software things that they wouldn't get if they didn't use that search engine.

The story recounts how similar ideas have been tried like this before. iWon gets mentioned for the giveaway model it pioneered, though as a long-term strategy, that hasn't kept the searchers at the service. To date, semi-copycat Blingo also shows that lightning does not strike twice.

Overture -- now part of Yahoo -- was another pioneer in building traffic through payment. In Overture's case, it paid publishers $0.03 cents per query they delivered. Others soon followed, though these programs later died off. They did get a boost when Google jumped in with its Google AdSense For WebSearch program last year.

That brings us to A9. It was also last year, in September, that the service started giving a 1.5 percent discount off Amazon purchases to those using A9. Well, 1.57 percent, which is pi divided by two, a joke on sharing the "pie" with searchers.

Over a year later, the program pretty much seems to have done nil to massively boost A9's popularity. But maybe the email sent out yesterday will reawaken folks. It said:

Dear A9.com user, As a regular user of A9.com, you get many benefits from the advanced search solutions and the personalization features we offer. In addition, you can receive 1.57%* off virtually everything you buy on Amazon.com. To take advantage of this benefit, join the A9 Instant Reward program and search on A9.com a few days per week. It's easy and it's free: go to http://a9.com/-/search/joinInstantReward.jsp and join with one click.

A9.com offers you results from over 300 sources with a single search including Web, images, blogs, and many more categories. You get the results all on one page that you can personalize for your needs. A9.com also shows you which sites you've already visited. With the A9 Toolbar you can access your bookmarks from any computer and even add your personal notes to every site you visit. Your search history is also available on the toolbar together with informative statistics on every Web site.

For more information on the A9 Instant Reward program, go to http://a9.com/-/company/instantRewards.jsp.

Thank you for using A9.com.

The A9.com Team

* Why 1.57%? Remember pi = 3.1415926535... from mathematics? With our pi/2% instant reward, we are sharing with you some of the revenue from the site. We're sharing the pi(e).

The downside to any pay-for-search plan are some of those other programs like this that long-time search marketers will remember, where those being paid to search were doing it for the money, rather than a side benefit. That was a negative to advertisers footing the bill. They want qualified leads, not work-from-home searchers.

Marketing Execs Lukewarm On Plan To Pay Searchers from MediaPost has two of search marketers sounding less than thrilled over any MSN plans to do pay-per-search because of these reasons.

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 12:14 PM | Permalink

December 13, 2005

Alexa Offers Fee-Based Vertical Search Services

I guess I get to be the underwhelmed one about Alexa announcing a new Alexa Web Search Platform that's available to anyone willing to pay a fee.

Pay a fee for what? You can create your own search engine by tapping into the 4 billion web pages Alexa has indexed over time. You can search against the entire index or just a selected set, in case you want to make your own vertical search engine.

It's hardly new territory. Back in 2000, we had a number of services offering to let you create your own vertical search engines, as covered more in my The Vortals Are Coming! The Vortals Are Coming! article from that period. These died off because during the dotcom melt down, no one was really willing to spend money to create verticals, especially when the search ad market had yet to mature.

Since then, search ads and verticals are both hot. But spending money to lease search services? That's a remnant from the days before search ads, when search engines wanted to be paid for storage and processor time. Search ads made the leasing services model go away.

The current fight for AOL between MSN and Google underscores this. AOL isn't being asked to stump up money for web search to those companies. It has an audience that MSN and Google want to reach. They stumble over themselves to see who can offer the best deal.

Ah, but what if you're not as big as AOL? I suppose paying Alexa to get off the ground may help some people develop and prove their market, at which point Google and Yahoo -- among others -- will fight to offer these proven verticals similar services for free.

It also has to be said that the Alexa pitch would be a heck of a lot stronger if Alexa itself actually used its own web index. But it doesn't. Want to search the web with Alexa? Alexa depends on Google to give it a reach well beyond the 4 billion pages that Alexa has gathered.

How about more rain on the parade? Well, what could you use instead of Alexa? Let's see:

  • Rollyo: Just out, allows you to create a vertical search engine by giving it a list of sites. Under the hood, Rollyo is tapping into Yahoo and refining it.  
  • Gigablast: Get your own custom vertical search engine right now, for free, by using Custom Topic Search. It's been out for nearly a year. Want some type of hosted service or something special. If it's not listed here, I've no doubt Gigablast will step up to deliver.  
  • Vortaloptics: This specialty firm began offering services back in 2003, offering to create vertical search engines for anyone. I wrote about them at the time as perhaps signaling a return to easy-to-make vertical search engines that looked likely before the dotcom downturn. They've been quiet, so perhaps no one's taking them up on things. But then again, perhaps the Alexa move might revitalize things.  
  • Google AdSense For Search: Want to search the entire web, just as Alexa offers? Out since last year, Google's more than happy to give you access to its entire database, for free, along with ads ready to go right alongside it. Nope, vertical search isn't as easy. You could try site-flavored Google search, or the Google API might help. If not, fair to say Alexa's move will spur Google along to offering more and probably for free, if you want to carry ads.  
  • Yahoo Search Marketing Partner Solutions: Yahoo doesn't have a self-serve custom web search program similar to Google, but that's only a matter of time. Until then, if you're big enough, they'll do custom solutions. Not big enough? There's the Yahoo Search API you can tap into.

I'm certain I'm missing some players on the list above. Gary will likely know them and will postscript if I'm missing some.

Back to Alexa, John Battelle has a rundown in his Alexa (Make that Amazon) Looks to Change the Game post and is pretty positive, though he notes he's not had a chance to really talk with developers.

Like John, I've not really talked with a ton of developers, and perhaps that might shape my view to be more positive. At the moment, I definitely don't see it as a hugely groundbreaking move that will reshape web search forever, any more than Amazon's A9 Open Search has yet to do. If you want that groundbreaking move, you have to go back to when the Google API was first offered years ago. This is just an extension of that.

To be positive, it's a welcome extension. Certainly more and more people have felt the various APIs are too limited. A paid model definitely helps those trapped between wanting more from a search service but not at the traffic or interest level where the search engine will decide it makes sense to lift limits or partner more closely. Alexa jumping in should help spur the majors along, and that will be welcomed.

For more, John points over to Amazon Revs Its Search Engine at the Wall Street Journal which stresses the Amazon view that this will cater to the vertical search market.

Alexa Search API Released from Google Blogoscoped looks a bit more at the move from a developers angle, finding some positives but not exactly jumping up and down about the move. Announcing the Alexa Web Search Platform Beta from the Alexa blog has more details from Alexa. You'll also find plenty of other commentary via Memeorandum.

Want to discuss, comment, tell me I'm clueless? Visit our forum thread, Alexa Web Search Platform.

Postscript from Gary: In addition to the services that Danny lists like Rollyo and Gigablast, here are a few other services you might want to know about:

+ From the Internet Archive. About a month ago, Brewster and crew introduced a new sevice called Archive-It, that "that allows users to create, manage and search their own web archives through a web interface." It's primarily aimed at institutions and libraries. How's that for ease of use? From the Archive-It FAQ: Subscribers to the service can create distinct web archives, containing only the content they are interested in harvesting, at whatever frequency suite their needs. All collections are text searchable. The annual subscription cost is $10,000 per year and allows and The annual subscription cost is $10,000 per year. This allows an institution to collect, manage and search up to 10 million web documents. The pilot users to this point has been memory institutions, state archives, and libraries. More in the FAQ.

+ Do it Yourself from the Internet Archive: Heritrix This free crawler developed at The Internet Archive is an, open-source, extensible, web-scale, archival-quality web crawler project." Good FAQ that includes a list of some of the organizations using Heretix. It also says that Heritix is available to "crawl/archive a set of websites," in other words a focused set of sites.

+ Nutch A well-known open source web-search software and includes a crawler, a link-graph database, parsers for HTML and other document formats, etc. One final comment, the Alexa Web Search platform offers an interesting and potentially useful demo. It allows you to search of images taken from digital cameras and exploit the metadata they often provide. Alexa is calling it "Camera Image Search." Why do I find it interesting? Because it offers fielded searching of submitted data. Instead of entering random terms and hoping for the best, this structured searching allows you to access precise results from the outset (of course, assuming the indexing is good). Camera Image Search could use better documentation (example searches would be a start), but I believe the idea is on target. I've called it "structured tagging" in the past and it could make tagging much more powerful as an info retrieval tool, especially if tagging of both text and imagery (much different situations) becomes more popular (big assumption). Of course, we have a few important and MAJOR caveats.

1) In terms of this Camera Image Search demo the structure and data comes directly from the camera, so it's easier to get accurate info but I think it hints at "fielded" interface can do in terms of general tagging.

2) In other situations it's different. Why?

3) Getting people to tag is a challenge in the first place, getting them to do more and add info to a specific field is another. However, tools could be developed to walk people to the process and offer suggestions.

4) Assuming that step 3 takes place, it's another issue to get the typical user to take advantage of the structure and use it to search. That said, a date field on any tagging service that was used correctly would make the search term "2005" or "Chicago" much more useful than just having them as free-text. For example, 2005 might be entered into the date the document was written field, Chicago might be included in where the document was authored or what the document is about field(s). Finally, this might be a help but it does not, in most situations, solve the many problems with authority control, synonyms, etc. While I think that in many cases allowing a text document "speak for itself" and let something like dynamic clustering assist in the organization, adding structure at the outset can make for even more clustering "power." Example? Look at the many ways you can search and cluster the structured data of PubMed using ClusterMed.

Postscript 2 from Gary: In his comments Danny notes how easy (it's true) Gigablast makes it to create a domain specific search. In addition to following the traditional steps, it was recently made even easier by simply adding the urls of the desired sites that you want searched to the Gigablast Advanced Search Page.

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 8:52 AM | Permalink

October 1, 2005

Add an A9 Customizable Search Box to Any Web Site

The A9 team has posted a new page with info and code to add customizable A9 search boxes to any web site. Currently available are boxes for A9.com Search and A9.com Yellow Pages search. More about other A9 services for webmasters and developers here.

Posted by Gary Price at 1:54 PM | Permalink

July 26, 2005

Amazon's A9 Adds Online Calculator

Amazon.com's A9 has joined other web engines in offering access to an online calculator that's accessible from any A9 search box. Results appear at the top of a web page results list. You'll spot an icon of an abacus located next the result. This page contains a examples of what the calculator offers. I'm betting that more special features and shortcuts are in the works at A9.

Posted by Gary Price at 3:11 PM | Permalink

July 6, 2005

Amazon's Bezos: Search Is Not A Zero-Sum Game

In the USA Today article: Amazon CEO takes long view, Amazon's founder Jeff Bezos is interviewed on the occasion of the company's 10th anniversary. Although most of the interview focuses on e-commerce, Bezo's does mention A9 (Amazon's search service) and responds to a question about competition in the search business. He believes (and I agree) that there is room for many players.

From the interview: Q: But how do you compete against Google and Yahoo in search, much less Microsoft and its next operating system, Windows Longhorn, which will be all about search?

A: Our premise is there are going to be a lot of winners. It's not winner take all. Other people do not have to lose for us to win. And A9.com is trying to build a very innovative kind of websearch.

Others, including Google CEO Eric Schmidt, also believe that there is room for many players in the search business. Schmidt made this point in a 60 Minutes interview earlier this year.

Schmidt said: "It?s perfectly possible that the current competitors can all compete and coexist actually quite well, at least for a few years. So I disagree with the people who say that this is a zero-sum game."

Posted by Gary Price at 11:34 AM | Permalink

June 24, 2005

A9 Makes Changes to Interface, Adds Features

Amazon.com's A9 has made a bunch of changes to their interface along with adding a few new features.

They include:

+ Faster Loading They've reduced the size of the A9 home page.

+ Easier Access to Additional Search Columns More than 200 OpenSearch columns are now available.

+ Personalized Tools on the Home Page Your History, Your Bookmarks, Your Diary, and Discover are shown on the home page only when you turn them on. These tools are only shown when you are signed in.

+ Location Search "The Yellow Pages location box opens automatically if you check the Yellow Pages checkbox. This lets you enter the location before you search."

+ Choice of Tabs or Multiple Tools on the home page If you are signed in, you can choose between one tool at a time using tabs, or multiple tools in columns similar to the search results page. Or, if you prefer, you can hide the tools entirely.

+ Opera 8.0 support

You can find a complete list of the changes and new features here.

Posted by Gary Price at 1:39 PM | Permalink

May 17, 2005

New Beta Release of A9 Now Available

This afternoon Amazon's A9 went live with a new beta release of their search tool. You can find a complete list of what's new or changed here.

I haven't had time to check the updated beta out but here are a few highlights from the A9 "What's New" page.

+ More Intuitive Search Column Selection: The buttons on the right have been replaced with checkboxes on the top. These checkboxes let you choose what to search. The checkboxes appear not only on the search results page, but also on the home page, so you can decide in advance what to search.

+ Faster Site: The home page is now much smaller and loads faster, especially if your personalized tools are turned off.

+ Easier Access to Additional Search Columns: In addition to checkboxes for the default set of searches, a "More Choices" dropdown provides easy access to additional searches. (The contents of this menu will change over time.) You can also use the menu to access over 100 additional OpenSearch columns.

+ Opera 8.0 support: Columns can be resized in Opera 8.0.

FYI, the features described as "new" in a Seattle Times this article have been a part of A9 since it went live last year.

Posted by Gary Price at 7:18 PM | Permalink

April 27, 2005

Amazon.com's Spends on Search Technology Development

Amazon.com reported their Q1 earnings yesterday. This IHT has details. If you're wondering if any tidbits about A9 were revealed, this Forbes article notes that Amazon.com spent $92 million (a 59% increase from Q1 2004) on technology. This number includes both A9 and other Amazon.com technology development. Amazon's CFO, Tom Szkutak, added that the company is continuing to hire programmers at A9 and for other Amazon.com web services.

Posted by Gary Price at 4:35 PM | Permalink

March 24, 2005

Report from PC Forum Search Panel

The ZDNet "Behind the Lines" blog has a look at a search panel that took place at PC Forum last week. The panel included Marissa Mayer from Google, Udi Manber from A9, Alain Rappaport, CEO of Medstory; and Arkady Volozh, CEO of Yandex, the leading Russian search engine and portal.

Here are a few key items (from my point of view)

+ Google's Marissa Mayer: "We don't know how to do [personalization] well, so we are starting with baby steps, such as knowing where you are as a context," Mayer said.

It will be interesting to see if Google will eventually request more info from users to help with personalization. Another question is, will Google users want to provide the info?

She [Marissa Mayer] said, "We need to get better not at doing searches, but at providing answers people are looking for. There will be a day when ten HTML links regardless of who you are is not the answer any more." She also said that the idea of everybody getting the same search result isn't reasonable.

100% agree on this one. Large engines like Ask Jeeves and MSN are already doing work in this area. Yahoo is also offering many shortcuts that in some cases place an answer on the results page. Google, too! Companies like Kozoru are also doing work in this area. I've said numerous times that for certain "ready reference" queries, search engines will become answer engines. Answers instead of links will also be important for mobile web search to grow.

+ Udi Manber from A9 "In general, people will learn to use search better but have to invest the thinking--we are not in the mind reading business."

Way to go Udi! I'm glad, no thrilled, to read this. A little (like a few minutes) of explanation or training can go a long way. It has been my experience that with a little education users not only leave the session having a couple of new skills but also get excited to go out and learn more on their own.

People can't use what the don't know about and unlike those of us who follow the search space closely, no one has told them what search tools can do with just a small amount of knowlege. As web engines grow larger, searching skills and knowledge about a variety of tools will become even more important. Yet, according to this study search skills haven't really changed in the past seven years. Not every good answer can get into the Top 10 results when a searcher enters two or three keywords.

I'm not only talking about advanced searching skills like placing phrases in quotation marks (-:, but just showing people that large engines offer many services (news, images, shortcuts, etc) beyond the web search box. Also, this training time can be used to share info about specialized search tools (aka verticals) that might be able to save the searcher time, provide them with better results, and allow them to do more with the results.

Education about search and info retrieval should be a part of the curriculum from first grade on. If this is the "info age" (pardon the cliche), shouldn't info retrieval skills along with critical info skills (ability to judge the quality of the content) be crucial? Unfortunately, in many cases, they're not.

Posted by Gary Price at 1:59 PM | Permalink

March 15, 2005

A9 is Now in the Weblog Search Business

A brief addendum to Danny's post about A9's just announced OpenSearch service. When you review the list of databases already available you'll see that A9 has also launched their own weblog search engine called "A9 Top Blogs Search." It currently provides searchable access to, "a constantly updated set of recent blog entries from over three hundred of the most influential English language blogs on the web." I was unable to find a list of what 300+ blogs are being searched or what criteria A9 uses to determine a blogs influence.

Posted by Gary Price at 7:25 PM | Permalink

March 10, 2005

Amazon's A9 Reaches To India

Amazon's A9 team may be based out of California, but the company also has a dedicated development team in Bangalore, India that's working on the push into search. More in Amazon cooking up search, Web products in India from IDG.

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 2:50 PM | Permalink

January 31, 2005

The OC Arrested By Ask Jeeves, Too

Earlier, I posted how A9 got a mention on The OC. Ask Jeeves got an OC-related plug on TV this week, as well.

OK, it wasn't the hip kids of The OC talking about Ask Jeeves but instead the crazy family of Arrested Development -- also set in Orange County's Newport Beach, that mentioned Ask Jeeves. To be specific, it was family lawyer Barry Zuckerkorn (actor Henry Winkler), even better known to many people as The Fonz from Happy Days.

Paid product placement? Nope. Instead, Ask Jeeves senior vice president Jim Lanzone emailed me to say a good college friend of his is the agent of the creator of Arrested Development. He uses Ask Jeeves, so that's apparently worked its way higher. No money was spent, and the mention was a surprise to Ask Jeeves.

"We didn't know about it in advance. We sent them some T-shirts to say thanks," Lanzone said.

All in all, a good opportunity to try out new Google Video (aka Google TV) service, as someone over at InsideGoogle did when commenting there on the A9 mention. Here's a rundown. First, the Ask Jeeves mention:

It's a private Stock, so you cannot just buy up the shares unless someone is willing to sell. Are you sure? That's what they said on Ask Jeeves. All right, who's the majority shareholder now?

The A9 reference is here:

Why, why happened? Did he call you? No, but I a9.Com'd him last night, and according to the O.C. Weekly, he's pretty much everything that's wrong with Western civilization, all wrapped up in one Guy..

For the record, A9 told News.com that it didn't pay for the mention:

"We didn't even know it was going to air," A9 Chief Udi Manber said. But "it shows people like...A9...and that they are telling their friends and family."

Meanwhile, how common is "googled?" Only three mentions: Conan O'Brien, Carson Daly and PBS. But extend it out to Google, and there are nearly 100 mentions of the company. Most are news realted, but looks like Regis is in the "did you Google that" camp.

Yahoo has many more mentions, but many of those see ads for the SBC Yahoo access service. Ironically, Yahoo is the most aggressive of all the services in terms of gaining product placement mentions. None of the above services has ever claimed to pay for these. Yahoo just struck a deal to get it into reality shows of The Apprentice and The Contender.

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 9:09 AM | Permalink

January 28, 2005

I A9'd Him? A9 Hits The OC

We've only just gotten the second season of The OC over here in the UK, so I haven't seen the episode just shown in the US where a character apparently says that they "A9.com'd" someone. So that's what all the kids are saying these days! Or are being paid to say, more likely. Spotted via Search Views, more details in this Beta News article, A9.com Finds Promotion In The OC.

As an OC native, we never called it "The" OC when I lived there. Just OC, thanks very much. As a search person, I certainly never hear anyone say they A9'd anything. To be honest, I rarely hear anyone say that they even "googled" anything. Sometimes I wonder if we all like to think people say that more than they really do.

Postscript: A9 says it didn't pay for the placement, and Ask Jeeves has had a mention this week elsewhere, as well. See The OC Arrested By Ask Jeeves, Too for more.

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 11:46 AM | Permalink

September 17, 2004

a9's Secret Weapon: Discounts For Searching?

What might help Amazon draw users away from Google, Yahoo, MSN and others to its new a9 search engine? How about 1.5 percent off your Amazon purchases? Now that will incent me when it's time to do my Christmas shopping. More from the Unofficial Google Weblog here: Amazon Discount for Using A9.

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 7:49 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

September 15, 2004

Amazon's a9 Launches

The press is buzzing today with news of the launch of Amazon's a9 search product. Battelle offers an overview. You'll also find stories in the NY Times, News.com, and the SF Chronicle.

a9 launched as a beta last April 2004.

Some Comments + I'm not "blown away" by a9 (at this point). However, this doesn't mean that some of the features a9 offers might not be useful for some of you.

+ To harness a9's full power you'll still need to register (you're Amazon.com login will work). Of course, some a9 options do not require a login.

+ a9 is still using Google as it's underlying database. IMHO, the more voices the better and I would love to see a9 create their own web database and ranking algorithm. This is another way they could differentiate themselves from Google and other players.

+ Today's launch uses new default color theme from what we saw with beta release. It's much easier on the eyes. You can also change the color theme (several options are available including the orginal color theme) and font size using the preferences page. This is also where Google's SafeSearch filter is located.

+ The basic interface is sleek and easy to use. Most of a9's features can be activated by simply clicking on one or more of the options listed on the right side of the page. Doing this opens a new "column" that can easily be resized. + a9 Web Results contain one or more ads sponsored listings. They also contain a direct link to the Alexa database (an Amazon.com company) to learn more about the page.

+ To run your search on another database a9 offers access to simply click one of the buttons on the right side of the page and a box containing these results will open. You can open, close, or resize these columns at any time.

+ Other databases now available from a9: ++ Reference (dictionary, thesaurus, and other tools) via Gurunet. Full access to Gurunet requires a subscription. ++ Movie info (via IMDB.com, another Amazon.com company) ++ Images (via Google Images)

+ Other options allow you to view your search history (all of your queries are stored on the a9.com server), remotely store bookmarks and view your diary entries. The diary is where you can add notes about any web page. To make diary entries you must use the a9 Toolbar.

+ At the present time the a9 Toolbar is only available for IE (using Windows). I'm surprised that for the launch other versions (Mozilla, Safari) are not available since two key features require it.

+ Finally, another option (still in beta) and only triggered from the a9 homepage is called Discover. Here you'll find: ++ Related Websites (based on what you've already looked at, updated at least twice a day) ++ "Web categories are based on your recently visited sites. Each category entry links to detailed information at Alexa." ++ Frequently Visited Sites "Links to your most frequently visited sites (listed by domain). The number of recent visits is displayed in parenthesis." ++ Movers and Shakers [what's this?] "Movers and shakers are those sites that have had the largest rise in average traffic the past week compared to previous weeks. This data is provided by Alexa."

You can learn more about these and other features here.

Bottom Lines I think you'll either love a9 (this is the greatest!) or find it not all that impressive (what's the big deal?). a9 has taken ideas available from disparate services (remote bookmark storage, being able to add and store notes about pages, see results from various databases) and has placed them within easy reach of the web searcher as they search. That said, MyYahoo! has offered some of these services for several years. However, utilizing them while you search is much easier with a9.

An idea. How about a feature that allowed the searcher to add any specialized database (vertical) to their personalized page? It would be also be exciting for a9 to work with libraries and create customized versions that would allow the researcher to access and search databases that the library licenses.

I also think a9 offering some type of dynamic clustering (Vivisimo like) of all results would be very useful.

We will be watching a9 very closely for new features.

Btw, Udi Manber, a9's creator, spoke at the University of Washington last November. You can watch an archived version of his lecture here. It's titled, "The World's Information at Everyone's Fingertips."

Posted by Gary Price at 1:53 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

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