Amazon recently released (publicly) it's A9 search engine. It's like Google merged with Amazon's personalization features: it saves your recent searches and your recent visits on it's servers, so that you can login from anywhere and retrieve your search'n'surf history (privacy?!?), and it serves results generated from Google's index. Everything is accesible from their IE toolbar, which also has additional features like a simple highlighter and a very very primitive popup blocker which I don't like at all. The only feature that this bar has that I would like Google to incorporate is the diary. Diary is like sticky note that you can put on any webpage on the web, which you can retrieve later from anywhere. Very usesul indeed.

On the search side, it simply reformats Google's results for now, which might change in the future if and when Amazon come out with their own algorithms. After all, they have the [now] famous Udi Manber as their "Chief Algorithms Officer". His skills are so likened that a search for his name at Google would show you a special advertisement from Google itself about job oppurtunities at the company. Anyway, A9's other notable search "features" are plain search URLs (a9.com/haydur) and it's "ability" to show results from Amazon's search inside books tool... but that's not the first time someone has tried to merge Amazon book search and Google. A small time [and very good!] search engine from Germany, FindForward, has been doing it for a while now.

But like all other Google-clones, A9 does not include any of the extra feature that the original offers, like the definitions or calculator. Still, it seems that this is the year of the search engines, with everyone from Yahoo! to Microsoft and even Amazon trying to grab the greatest market share away from Google. Apparently, the more the web grows the harder it gonna get to find the right material, and only the best algoritms would be able to find the needle in the haystack. Google's of course winning for now... but who knows. It's a mad world.

So I'm just gonna wait for the Google IPO while you can keep your fingers crossed... for me.