The search options under the A9 Toolbar allow users to search a site or page they are currently visiting.
The SearchEngineWatch blog discussed A9’s new toolbar earlier today. Owned by Amazon.com, A9 is a search engine that, despite Amazon’s resources, has not yet made a great impact on the search market.
The toolbar has been updated with new features, like a Fast Sign In for multiple Amazon account holders using the same computer. Signing in to the A9 toolbar with one’s Amazon.com account information allows users to store bookmarks and have them available on any computer.
A Diary function lets users create notes about a particular page, and have those notes reappear when they visit the site in the future. The toolbar will retain a user’s web site history as they go from place to place online; that history feature can be turned off and on by clicking the History button.
Gary Price on SEW noted how a search box for a site could be added to A9’s toolbar search options simply by right-clicking in the site’s search box and selecting an option for doing so from the menu. I couldn’t duplicate that with my test; the option never appeared in the right-click menu. I was using IE on Windows XP, which could be the problem as he mentioned using the Firefox browser for his test.
For anyone who found the terms of Google’s My Search History in its Personalized Search too terrifying from a privacy standpoint, the A9 toolbar will have you reaching for the tinfoil cap. Like Google, if you sign in to the service, then remote servers (in this case Amazon’s) will be tracking where you go and what you visit, unless you turn off the History feature.
A9 Toolbar’s search and site info features are not affected by a user being signed in or not. The added usefulness of the toolbar comes down to whether or not a user trusts Amazon with that information.
I found the Site Info function, which gathers data from Alexa on a site, an interesting enough feature. Selecting the Site Stats for… option for a site one is visiting takes the user to an Amazon.com product page, where that Alexa data is displayed.
David Utter is a staff writer for Murdok covering technology and business. Email him here.
