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September 16, 2004

A9: What Play is it?

There have been a lot of interesting entries and contrasting opinions (see below for a summary of many of these)about this week's official launch of A9, the search engine from "an Amazon company." While I'll save my impressions of the service below, I have to say I really intrigued by what play Amazon is running here.

Search is one heated battlefield with apparent dragraces galore, whether Microsoft entering the fray against Google, Google trying to extend its platform into Microsoft desktop territory, or Yahoo or others trying to win in local search, or Baidu in China.

So what play is A9?

• Stealth? Based on the relatively low profile of marketing, it seems like A9 is trying to avoid direct comparason or confrontation. Heck, they are just using Google search results and providing some "complementary" enhancements. "This is just a commerce thing - don't worry." Yeah, right.

• Platform? Well, Amazon is one of the most platform oriented companies out there. It has always been more about their platform than their actually being a direct merchant. A9 clearly extends and reinforces the Amazon ecosytem. If you've ever bought anything on Amazon, A9 knows you automatically - providing more customer data and recommendaitons for targeting - one of the things Amazon is just plain the best at. The integrated book search is clearly reinforcing, same with movies and soon everything else I'm sure. On the Amazon home page, the A9 search dialogue is right below product search and could easily be confused with it (no loss for Amazon if the previous statement is true).

• Dragrace: Google in the long run has got to view this as a race with them, a threat. If people start using the A9 toolbar, just because it's nice those are eyeballs away from Google. At first it could be easy to pooh pooh A9 as a gimmick with its somewhat cluttered appeareance, history, bookmarking and other features. But they are actually kind of nice and note that Amazon also gives a small discount to anyone with an A9 toolbar. All small, sneaky, stealthy yes, but I cannot imagine that Google sees this as anything except a long term thinly veiled dragrace.

Now, for all that competitive strategy talk, how is A9? What are people saying?
• Paul Kedrosky is skeptical. He is still searching for the one feature that would make it indispensible.
• John Battelle has a balanced view recognizing in his Biz2.0 article that they have adding a new level of sophistication to search but does not know whether most users will want that level. That said, in his first look he did not doubt Amazon's intentions: "It seems to me, Google's position in Amazon's A9 implementation is at best a step backwards. If A9 is as good as it seems to be, every customer that uses and/or switches to A9 becomes an A9 search customer, and, more likely than not, a deeper and far more loyal Amazon customer. In essence, Amazon seems to be making a play for Google's customers."
• Business pundit thinks it's clearly an interesting move, while it's readers wonder what's the big deal.
• The Unofficial Google Weblog thinks that it's a pretty different, pretty elegant interface.
• The folks at Precommerce admire it. Smart play for Amazon, smart use of Alexa, like how they are pushing search farther, and look forward to the next chapter.
• Me. I have to admit to being skepitcal at first. It seemed cluttered and oppressive. Then I noted how easily I could personalize the interface. How cool it was to have simple things like history and reference. And how nice it was that it already knew me. Personalization is huge for me and these guys did the first real step in that direction in search. Hats off to them.

Still what I'm really excited about is seeing how this all plays out.

Posted by johnza at September 16, 2004 10:00 PM

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