Google has a lot of great features, but it’s limited in its ability to customize its searches for you, because it doesn’t take registration data. A9.com, a new search site from an Amazon.com subsidiary, takes Google’s search results and adds some useful personalized features:
Search Inside the Book: Each search on A9 returns not only websites related to your search terms, but results from Amazon.com’s Search Inside the Book feature — links to PDFs of any pages from books that include your search term. (See the earlier column I wrote on this Amazon.com feature.)
Search History: This is probably the most useful new feature, particularly if you find yourself often doing the same searches repeatedly. All of your searches on A9 are stored and you can look them up at any time by logging onto the site from any computer. Clicking on a link performs the search again. You can edit your history to delete old searches. (If you’re concerned about the information A9 is gathering about your searches, here is the site’s privacy policy.)
Click History: If any of the Web search results include a site that you’ve seen in a previous search, it’s marked on the result. Not only that, but A9 even lists the last time you visited a site. This is a great tool to help you avoid weeding through the same sites over and over again if you find yourself doing searches that have overlapping results.
Site Info: You can move your cursor over “Site Info” buttons to pop up more information about that site, such as sites that “people who visit this page also visit.”
URL shortcut: At A9.com you can search directly from the browser URL box by typing: http://www.a9.com/query.
To use the most interesting personalization features, you’ll need to register with Amazon.com. A9 uses your Amazon.com username to store the personal search information.
A9 Toolbar: Like Google, A9 also offers a toolbar. In addition to standard toolbar features you’ll find on Google’s and others, such as search highlighting and a pop-up blocker, A9 adds a neat Diary feature. Basically, you can take notes on any Web page, and reference them whenever you visit that page, on any computer that you use. Your entries are automatically saved whenever you stop typing or when you go to another page. You can see all of them via the toolbar or at http://diary.a9.com.
This diary feature could come in handy for reporters who want to mark useful information they find on sites.
So why not just use this instead of Google?
A9 may have a lot of features Google doesn’t, but it also is missing a lot of key Google features — most importantly, Google’s advanced searching interface. A9 is still in beta, though, so hopefully that’s something that will be added before the final version is launched.
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