[Sigia-l] Amazon, the search engine

[Pabini Gabriel-Petit]

Hello Livia

In regard to:
http://www.a9.com/

You said:
> I like the search history feature. I would love to hear your feedback on
the
> use of tabs in the search results. It's the 'tabs as lenses' idea
Christina
> Wodtke talks about here http://www.eleganthack.com/archives/002711.html.
But
> I guess you can always expect tabs from Amazon... ;)

***[PGP] Thanks for turning us on to this site. Very interesting. I've been
interested in Alexa on the Amazon site since Christina Wodtke drew it to our
attention. It's nice that we can log in to A9 using our Amazon user
information. I like the search history, too. I can't figure out to what you
were referring when you mentioned tabs though. There aren't any conventional
tabs on the search results page that I'm seeing. Unless you're referring to
the vertical, draggable Open Search History and Open Book Results
expand/collapse panel controls, which are very cool. These don't display
different views of the same information though. The show completely
different information. I use Amazon a lot, so those pages are heavily
populated for me.

> I'm a bit puzzled over the sponsored links. I searched for "information
> architect" and got "Over 12,000 House Plans House, Cottage, Multi Family
and
> Garage Plans - Ready to Build" humm.... what happened to controlled
> vocabularies?

***[PGP] I just searched for information architecture and got good results.
Maybe that was just a momentary glitch that you encountered. This is beta
software after all. ;-)

There is one major usability problem/bug on this site: The browser Back
button doesn't work on much of the site.

Samantha Bailey referred to the notes feature, which is a feature of the
toolbar. I wanted to use the Alexa toolbar, which seems to be the same thing
as the A9 toolbar, until I read their Privacy Policy--NOT private. It's what
I think is called a "sniffer" and tracks your Web usage. See the excerpt of
their Privacy Policy below.

Pabini
________________________________________

Pabini Gabriel-Petit
Principal & User Experience Architect
Spirit Softworks
www.spiritsoftworks.com
INFORMATION COLLECTED AND STORED BY A9.COM'S TOOLBAR SERVICE
A9.COM'S TOOLBAR SERVICE COLLECTS AND STORES FULL UNIFORM RESOURCE LOCATORS
("URLS") FOR EVERY WEB PAGE THAT YOU VIEW WHILE USING THE A9.COM TOOLBAR
SERVICE. THESE URLS SOMETIMES INCLUDE PERSONALLY IDENTIFIABLE INFORMATION.
URLS FROM SECURE (HTTPS) WEB PAGES ARE NOT COLLECTED. BY COLLECTING URLS,
A9.COM TRACKS AND COLLECTS A RECORD OF USERS' WEB BROWSING ACTIVITY WITHIN
AND ACROSS WEBSITES. A9.COM ALSO COLLECTS AND STORES OTHER USER INFORMATION
YOU GIVE A9.COM WHEN YOU DOWNLOAD AND INSTALL THE SOFTWARE AND INFORMATION
YOU ENTER INTO THE TOOLBAR SERVICE. BECAUSE A9.COM IS A WHOLLY OWNED
SUBSIDIARY OF AMAZON.COM, INC., A9.COM IS ABLE TO CORRELATE INFORMATION IT
COLLECTS WITH PERSONALLY IDENTIFIABLE INFORMATION THAT AMAZON.COM HAS, AND
AMAZON.COM HAS ACCESS TO INFORMATION COLLECTED BY A9.COM. AMONG OTHER
THINGS, A9.COM AND AMAZON.COM USE THIS INFORMATION TO CUSTOMIZE,
PERSONALIZE, AND OTHERWISE IMPROVE THE SERVICES THEY PROVIDE TO YOU.