Amazon to Take on Google? 196
KRck writes "Looks like Amazon is going to jump into the search engine business and try and compete directly with Google, by building a new company A9 which they hope to launch in October."
If A = B and B = C, then A = C, except where void or prohibited by law. -- Roy Santoro
Didn't they up prices for loyal customers? (Score:5, Interesting)
Case in point: I was buying a ticket for a flight, and when I started, there were lots of available seats on a variety of days at 317 each way. By the time I had gone through the process, put in my credit card details to buy it, and hit submit, a message appeared saying "The seating information has changed, please start from the beginning again." Magically, all the seats on all the same days had jumped to 900 each way. My point? I don't know. But Amazon has played dirty before. And I don't trust them.
Anyway, I didn't book my tickets with British Airways. Some other mug will have to pay the inflated prices.
Natural Biases (Score:2, Interesting)
It's probably legal, since it's Amazon's search engine, but if I'm looking for a new blender or whatever, I can bet a million to one the first couple ( if not more ) links will be geared toward amazon.com
Reminds me of the MSN search engine.
Comment removed (Score:5, Interesting)
Amazon/Alexa has a good spider/crawler.. (Score:3, Interesting)
I've noticed more activity from their spider (useragent ia_archiver) than I have from google on my domains recently; so I tend to believe they have a more up-to-date and possibly larger index.
Re:Thank goodness! (Score:3, Interesting)
Well, there perhaps is a little more overlap than you may think. Remember some of Google's appendages such as Froogle [google.com] and Google Catalogs [google.com]. Granted however, Google is generally about finding information, and it seems like Amazon is really positioning themselves to find products/vendors.
But serious competition may be good, even if its not directly the same market. Things like this help keep great companies like Google working hard. As long as it is competition. I really don't want non-competitive devices such as patents or other legalease destructiveness to be raised.
If you think back to how Amazon got started, selling books, what I'd really like to see some day is something more along the lines of a library. And one which was indexed with something like Google's technology. I'd like to be able to search for books on something other than just the title, author, ISBN, etc. Granted Amazon has made some book searching progress, with the introduction of buyer-reviews and linking similar books together based upon who buys what other books. But wouldn't it be great to be able to find books based upon some text in the book? But given the sad state of copyright law, that will probably remain science fiction.
Froogle? (Score:4, Interesting)
Taken from this [google.com] page:
Froogle is a new service from Google that makes it easy to find information about products for sale online. By focusing entirely on product search, Froogle applies the power of Google's search technology to a very specific task: locating stores that sell the item you want to find and pointing you directly to the place where you can make a purchase.
I've only tried it a few times awhile back, and it seems to work pretty well. Will this compete with A9?
not all cheesies and gum (Score:4, Interesting)
Your search found... 40 CDs? (Score:2, Interesting)
The problem here is that when people search the net for "Britney Spears", they're not looking to buy her CDs - but that's will be what they get with Amahoo!!!
Hmmm.. (Score:3, Interesting)
So, I, for one, welcome Google, our current search-engine overlords..
Re:Didn't Amazon already do this. (Score:2, Interesting)
And boy, were they excited:
"PlanetAll is the most innovative use of the Internet I've seen," said Amazon's founder and CEO Jeff Bezos. "It's simply a breakthrough in doing something as fundamental and important as staying in touch."
"This is a significant opportunity for all of us at Junglee to extend our technology well beyond our current base," said Ram Shriram, president and COO of Junglee. "With Amazon.com, we can address the larger challenges of e-commerce sooner--and on a broader scale--than we could have done alone."
I guess the technology Amazon obtained for "equity valued at approximately $280 million" has gone to good use. Hard to tell, though, since both [junglee.com] partners' [planetall.com] websites have gone up in smoke. I wonder if Amazon will even bother to renew the domains, which expire in May [whois.sc] and October [whois.sc] 2004?
For some reason, I don't see much of a future for the A9 project anymore -- as if I ever really did...
They already have something of this sort (Score:4, Interesting)
The other day I searched Amzazon's website for the PC Infrared (IrDa) adapter and they showed a section called "Sponsored Links" on their website.
Here are the details of Amazon's Sponsored Links [amazon.com]
Copy and paste of the text:
SPONSORED LINKS
Sponsored Links are advertisements that Amazon.com provides to you. We receive Sponsored Links from Google's AdWords service. When you click on a Sponsored Link, we get revenue. The selection of Sponsored Links that are displayed is based on keywords. For example, if you search for "Bruce Springsteen" or view pages about Bruce Springsteen, the Sponsored Links may point to sites that sell tickets to his concerts or provide information about him. Sponsored Links are always clearly labeled.
Generating additional revenue from Sponsored Links allows us to offer lower prices to you--something we are dedicated to doing every way we can.