Try Some A9 Sauce On That Next Web Search

I give credit to “Thomas” , a participant in one my recent workshops at Manukau Institute of Technology here in Auckland, NZ for turning me on to a new search site- A9. It is a whopper.

It’s been about a Google years since I got interested or even raised an eyebrow at a new search engine, but this one is worth a click. If I can scan the docs right, it is “powered by Amazon” (uses Amazon logins and likely for looking among books). Yup just clicked the A9 sign in link, and was prompted for my Amazon.com user name, the sanem familiar Amazon interface. Niiiiiice integration.

And A9 uses Guru.net for looking up reference queries, it uses Google for doing web and Image searches. Internet Movie Database provides movie results. Alexa comes into play somewhere- I think for the recommending or “Discover” feature. Accounts allow you to save searches or recall a search history, and I think add notes via a “diary” (??)

The A9 Diary is a feature that allows you to easily take notes on any web page, and see them whenever you visit that page, on any computer that you use, as well as find them through search or through a list of all your diary entries maintained at diary.a9.com

The default search brings results in for Google web and image search- clicking the buttons on the right expands the search (without a screen refresh!) to add another column of results. You can also dynamically change the size of the search results.

So when all else fails, reach for a vanity search: http://a9.com/Alan%20Levine (look at that tidy, compact, re-usable URL!) See if you can figure out which results are mine, and which belong to the “Memorabilia Collector”, “Recruitment Specialist”, “Math professor”, “Lawyer”.