Amazon.com has discontinued several distinctive features of its search engine, A9.com, including a search history that recorded all the searches ever made by a user, and mapping technology that captured street-level images of businesses in the largest U.S. cities, that were among its most distinctive features, the company confirmed.
The A9 Toolbar, maps, Yellow Pages and a personalized diary and bookmark features are no longer available, a spokesman said.
The Seattle-based online retail leader said its Web site has simplified the look of its home page to give consumers easier access to more than 400 sources and a “continuous scroll” option that allows users to see more search results.
Spokesman Andrew Herdener said A9, Amazon’s subsidiary based in Palo Alto, Calif., would continue to operate the A9.com Web site and enhance product search on its online retail site Amazon.com. Herdener said the company is “shifting its priorities to areas where it can provide the greatest benefit for customers.”
In a press release issued lately without much fanfare, Amazon.com said it was launching a “new look and focus” for the search engine. That new focus led to the online retailer dropping many of the services that differentiated the site from rivals Google, Yahoo and others.
Lost in the redesign was the A9 browser toolbar and personalized services, which encouraged users to log in so that it could remember their searches. Now, the site would not ask users to log in or accumulate such data, Herdener said.
Herdener said Amazon.com would retain the search histories it had accumulated but did not have any immediate plans to use them.
In addition, Seattle-based Amazon.com dropped the site’s street-level mapping, which provided pictures of many local businesses, so a person, for example, could get a front-view of a restaurant, along with those of surrounding buildings.
Amazon Chief Executive Jeff Bezos touted one of the search engine’s more unique features in interviews and at an annual shareholders meeting in May 2005.
A9 had put considerable effort into taking detailed, street-level photos of 20 U.S. cities, which people could use to map directions and find businesses. “A9 had mounted cameras to trucks, and used global positioning system units to capture street-level images of businesses in more than a dozen U.S. cities.”
However, Windows Live Local recently launched similar street-side imagery, which A9 users can access through its search engine, although the preview features only Seattle and San Francisco for now. Herdener said it was too early to say what Seattle-based Amazon will do with the technology and images now.
Google Inc. and Microsoft Corp. — also have invested heavily in such photographic search technologies.
Amazon.com also is discontinuing a toolbar that helped keep track of such information. People who used the service will be able to retrieve their own personal data, such as Web site bookmarks, by following instructions on the A9 Web site.
A9 also has added some other new functions, including the ability to display search results as a continuous list rather than in one-page blocks.
The redesigned site focuses on delivering results from search engine Live.com from Microsoft. It also searches a limited number of sites under specific categories, such as entertainment and news; and lets users add sites to the list. The company previously used Google’s search engine. Amazon also offers results from other sources, such as Wikipedia.
Danny Sullivan, editor and chief of SearchEngineWatch.com, said A9’s new interface reduces it to a meta-search engine. “They have pared it down to the minimum number of things that they can support,” he said. Amazon has never said how much money it spent on developing the site or the size of the subsidiary, which is a private company.
Herdener said the A9 division also will continue to work on improving the search results on the Amazon.com sales site. A9, of course, also searches Amazon.com for products, but the retailer has dropped the rewards program that gave A9 users a small discount on purchases.
Amazon’s A9 unit, which was introduced as a general purpose search 2-1/2 years ago is also responsible for developing search services to improve the shopping experience on Amazon.com’s own properties.
Despite its big-name parent, A9 has not gained much traction among users. It ranked No. 32 among search engines in the United States, accounting for just 0.1 percent of all searches, or 3.2 million searches, according to August data from Nielsen/NetRatings.
Google ranked first with more than 3 billion searches in the same period.
Google remains the omnipresent leader among search engines, commanding more than half of the U.S. market, according to August data for Nielsen//NetRatings.
A9 suffered a blow in February when its chief executive Udi Manber went to Google. He was replaced by David Tennenhouse, the former director of research at Intel.
Amazon entered search at a time when online retailers worried that larger search engines might encroach on their territory, but Amazon remains synonymous with online retail. “Maybe they have decided they do not need to be in there,” said Sullivan, of SearchEngineWatch.com.
A spokesman for Amazon.com would not acknowledge that the changes amounted to a retreat in the search market.