by Head of Search
Andrew Girdwood
Amazon's search engine; powered and fed ads by Google, left its testing phase and shades of brown behind. The site re-launches with a new look and new features. Andrew Girdwood
This bigmouthmedia search engine consultant watched the changes sweep in live, his A9 toolbar updated and new buttons appeared before his eyes. Personalisation is important to A9, it's a key concept and a quick inspection of the new features showed me that Amazon knew all the sites I'd visited lately and the searches I'd done. This wasn't surprising, the terms and conditions are up front about this, as the whole point of logging into the toolbar (with your Amazon account) is so you can build a tailored history. The surprise was that this SEO worker had only conducted shy of 2,000 searches at A9 or Google this month.
The toolbar continues its diary feature. If you want you can record comments about web pages you visit and have them saved in the diary. Old diary notes may have been overwritten in this upgrade and that may put users off from trusting the feature in the future. There's a good bookmark feature in the toolbar now, one which supports folders. The advantage of a toolbar based bookmark/favourite list is that it moves around computers with you. Download the toolbar, log in and your bookmarks are there. Yahoo's toolbar offers this feature too.
Perhaps the most exciting addition to A9's toolbar is the list feature. Search Google or A9 and the toolbar remembers your search engine results. You can click on the first search result, read the page and then click the next button the toolbar and you'll be taken to what was the second result in the search engine results. This is wonderful for searching through search results and it emphasises the importance of being on the first page at Google.
A9 is now white and blue, it's a far more usual colour scheme than the old brown one. The side search options have been expanded. You can still get Amazon suggestions for books on the right of your screen along side your search results but you can add research, images, history, movies and even the diary text on the right too.
The Alexa powered "Site Info" buttons remain with the onHover information boxes lighting up with traffic info and related sites. A9 remembers when you last visited the site and tells you so.
Another popular feature of the A9 beta test which survives in this edition is the handy URL search feature. Add your search term to the end of the A9 URL and the search engines automatically searches for it.
For example;
http://a9.com / brandintelligence or
http://a9.com / search-engine-optimisation
A9's full list of features is known as the What's Cool List.
