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Amazon.com subsidiary A9.com may have officially entered the search wars on Wednesday, but its effort so far is drawing lukewarm user reviews and raising privacy concerns over its core personalization features.
A9.com, now out of a beta begun in April, is taking a different approach from major search engines such as Google Inc. and Yahoo Inc. It has focused squarely on adding a new user interface and personalization on top of existing search results, rather than on developing its own Web index.
The search service brings together Web and image results from Google, movie information from the Amazon.com-owned Internet Movie Database Inc., reference information from GuruNet Corp. and book-text search from Amazon.com.
A9.com CEO Udi Manber declined to say whether the Palo Alto, Calif., company is planning to develop its own index to replace Google. The site also uses sponsored links from Googles AdWords program.
“Our goal is to innovate and invent new things in search,” said Manber. “Search is not a solved problem.”
On the user interface side, A9.com displays each set of search results in its own column, which users can view side-by-side by clicking a series of tabs on the right of the interface.
More in line with its parent company, though, A9.com is heavy on personalization. Users are prompted to log in, using the same log-in as for Amazon.com, and A9.com collects and saves users search history. The site also includes a browser toolbar download, which lets users store bookmarks and notations about Web sites.
While A9.com has a unique design and interesting customization features, it lacks innovation in the core Web search technologies of indexing information and returning relevant results, said Melissa Burgess, director of business development at search-engine marketer Impaqt, in Pittsburgh.
“Theres so much to go through, I wonder if the typical searcher will want to utilize this stuff or will want a clean, simple interface as Google has provided over the past three to four years,” she said. “I cant imagine that they are going to go head-to-head with Google.”
John Rhodes, a Web-site usability specialist who runs consulting company Oristus, said that A9.coms interface might be attractive to some power users but that it is not tailored well to average users.
Most users lack the screen size to properly view multiple columns of search results, he said. A9.com allows up to eight columns to appear at once.
“The interface is just too complex for the average users,” said Rhodes, in Binghamton, N.Y. “[The service] is not significantly better for users to make the switch.”
A9.coms biggest shift from other search engines is its extensive use of personalization, one of the emerging trends among search engines. For example, like Amazon.coms suggestion of books based on users past habits, A9.com suggests searches and Web sites based on users past searching history.
To privacy advocate Pam Dixon, those personalization features carry with them more risk than reward. Dixon, executive director of the World Privacy Forum, advised consumers to avoid those features by blocking Web cookies or use A9.coms alternative search site, generic.a9.com, which does not rely on an Amazon.com log-in.
Next Page: A9.com upfront about tracking.
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A9.com is upfront and fairly clear about its tracking of search behavior in its privacy policy, Dixon said, where it states that as an Amazon.com subsidiary it may correlate information gathered on A9.com with personal information gathered by Amazon.com.
“If you use Amazon and an Amazon cookie, then the Amazon and A9 cookie is correlated,” Dixon said. “Whatever search terms are on A9 then are correlated with Amazon purchases and habits, and it is kept and they make no bones about it.”
So far, A9.com has provided few details about how the search service and Amazon.com will work together and share information. The Amazon.com Web site does include a query box for searching A9.com.
Manber said that the historical information on user search and site history is stored on A9.coms own servers, but he declined to say how or if the company plans to combine the data with Amazon.coms customer information.
“Were very sensitive to privacy,” Manber said. “If [users] are leery and dont feel comfortable about recording history, we provided features for turning it off. But its a powerful feature and to some extent its an extension of ones memory.”
When editing the history of both past searches and past Web sites visited, users can delete specific entries or clear the entire record, he said. With the toolbar, users also can turn on and off the viewing of history records there.
A9.com is giving Rhodes second thoughts precisely because of the uncertainty of how his search history will be eventually used. The potential for his Web search behavior to be tied all the way to his credit-card information from Amazon.com purchases is disconcerting, he said.
“It is confusing that its a search engine tied into Amazon, and in what way?” Rhodes asked. “Given the connection between what youre searching for and your personal data, financial data and transaction history, thats too much information in the hands of one entity.”
Beyond A9.com and Amazon.com directly, Dixon is more concerned with having years or eventually decades of peoples search and site-visiting history being stored on servers that are outside of their control. The privacy policy makes no promise of deleting information, she said, and the companies could disclose personal search histories if they were sought by law enforcement or government agencies.
“Its not that anyone is doing anything wrong, but do you want someone to know all the information about you and to know more about you than you even know about you, and then to be combining it with a shopping megastore?” Dixon asked.
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