Nobody has really taken Amazon’s A9 search engine very seriously but they just redesigned the user interface and in doing so they blew Ask, AOL, Google, Live Search, and Yahoo! out of the water.
Unable to build their own competitive search technology, Amazon has now teamed up with Microsoft’s Live Search (still branded as Windows Live in the A9 interface) to drive general Web search results. But that’s only the beginning.
Type something into the search box, like books by Michael Martinez, you’ll see a continuously scrolling frame window (good-bye pagination ala Ms. Dewey Search) with Web search results from Live Search.
All well and good (my books display first, which is as it should be in any SEO’s mind), but you can click on check boxes in a special navigation control gizmo in the left-hand margin and see books come up from Amazon. Well, I don’t optimize for Amazon so I’ll let the other Michael Martinez’s get some visibility. But wait! You can search for Middle-earth books by Michael Martinez and there I am at the top of Amazon’s list (which is also a continuously scrolling results set).
Now that is just too cool.
You can switch between search types (go for Entertainment, News, Images, etc.) and they’ll offer you a list of sources or source groups. I can live without the Ickipedia search but at least they let me turn that off whenever it comes up.
But wait, there’s more!
Click on the Add/Remove Search Groups link and you’re presented with an interface that lets you add Geek Search, Shopping, and other collections of search sources to your left-hand margin navigation. So search refinement becomes customizable in a new and more efficient way.
These search channels aren’t just preconfigured because you can define your own search group. You choose from 400+ sources. So I created a really cool “Michael Martinez” group and it searched only the sources I selected.
This is the kind of ego-brushing interface that could make people want to come back for more. They just need to add a few thouasnd more search sources (or, better yet, let us add them AND allow us to publish our custom search sets through their service).
The only thing I don’t like is the service’s insistence upon switching me back to a previous search set when I change the query — especially when it throws me into a useless Ickipedia search (why on Earth would I want to see unreliable, biased information?).
Amazon, you have definitely taken search interface design forward in a big, major way. Just get rid of Ickipedia, remember which search set I’m using, and let me be a little more flexible in designing my own custom search sets, and you might become one of my favorite search sources.
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