p2pnet.net News:- Yesterday we said the Amazon smile might be there for a good reason following the launch of its A9 search engine.

Other reports said Amazon is trying to out-google Google. And in one way or another, all them singled out the fact that, “A9.com remembers your information”.

However, one Reader’s Writes post thinks the ‘follow-that-search‘ feature is “the scariest thing I’ve ever heard”.

Another said, “I just have a huge issue with my information being tabulated, correlated, run through various mechanisms and eventually turned into a commodity to be used against me later. Its what advertisers do, watch people, hold focus groups all in an effort to ’sell’ more. I don’t see this as being much different. Some things you cant avoid (much to my frustration) like my save on foods card which offers discounts for card holders. Ah remember the days when a sale was a sale no strings attached?”

And a third says:

“Here is the rub. This may sound ‘off’, that I am more critical of one but not the other.

“The touted ’strength’ of this new search engine is largely to do with the storing of your searching history. It stores when you have searched for a page (and will tell you when you did the search), stores the information (both searches and urls visited) in a personal history column.

“Google, for instance, works by typing in a query and the browser returns the result, nothing else. A9 tracks your searches and builds a profile of your searches and site visits then uses that to build on a “personalised” search. Great so far I like the idea. The toolbar offered also factors into this, in fact the toolbar tracks all sites visited regardless of whether you use A9 for your searches or not. The claim is more you use A9 the better it becomes and you would have to in order to get a accurate profile of your searching habits. This personalisation is where it stands out from other search engines. I don’t care that they know my screen resolution, browser used, OS used, IP, country of origin, what terms I used to perform a search, last sight visited.

“I do care when it becomes Anne Sharp visited x,y and z today. They could perform this personalisation for the user without name, address, credit card information and not have it tied into a amazon.com account. (I had to create a A9 account because I don’t shop at amazon – so it is possible to fogo the personal information. I just supplied a email address, moniker and password)

“Finally, the rub. The generic site can’t store anything, you can’t even change preferences; moderate image search is always on, can’t modify which languages you want to do your search in. The searches done will have results very similar to searches done on google. So what is the point?

“Side note. part of the potential power of this search engine is what they call “discover” which finds sites you might be interested in based on your previous searched AND the searches of other users of A9.

“ps: most likely repeated earlier points – notorious habit of mine, wasn’t done cause I didn’t think you got the point more my worry I didn’t say it right the first time.”

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See:-

A9.com remembers – Why use A9.com

follow-that-search - Amazon’s A9 vs The Rest, p2pnet, September 18, 2004

‘Scary!’

This entry was posted on Sunday, September 19th, 2004 at 3:46 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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