A9, a Strong New Search Engine Alternative to Google

A9 (http://a9.com/) is a new webcrawler that allows browsing of more than one search engine at once while earning you a discount on Amazon.com. Internet Movie Database started featuring it early last year as its external search engine. Then, Amazon began sponsoring an "A9 program" that gave regular users of A9 a 1.57% (half of the value of p) discount on Amazon products. It first offered this by private email to regular IMDB users, but now, anyone can sign up at Amazon (http://www.amazon.com/). Just click on the A9 p/2% link in the upper left-hand corner of the Amazon homepage. You can use your username from Amazon to register with A9.

You don't have to use A9 from IMDB or Amazon to get the discount. Once you've registered, A9 counts these hits for you if you sign in from its homepage. The link is in the upper right-hand corner.

Registration also gives you extra features, like a toolbar that keeps a count of your hits history, cookies and a diary. However, you can only use the toolbar if you have at least Firefox 1.0, Mozilla 1.7, Microsoft Internet Explorer 5.5 or Netscape 7.2. It doesn't yet include Safari. That said, the regular features are available on all browsers.

A9 and Amazon are cagey about how much you need to use the search engine to get the discount, but personal experience indicates that several searches per week ought to do it. Keep in mind, though, that currently the discount only applies to the American Amazon site not the international sites.

Even without the discount, A9 is pretty attractive, especially for specific searches. Google is great for global searches of very specific terms, but if you need to search a general term or make a search in more specific databases, it gives you too many disorganized and irrelevant hits to be useful. Here is where A9 excels. A9 provides a focused search of over 300 search engines and databases, as well as the option of narrowing the search down to results near a specific address. Unlike Google, you can search up to 10 of these search engines/databases at once (instead of in sequence) and the results will all appear on the same page. Or you can choose just one or two search engines to search, depending on what and how many you check.

A9 is so specific because it searches narrower subject-based search engines (like IMDB), which can be more powerful in their own areas than general search engines. Along with a general search, the main page accesses major databases like IMDB and Wikipedia, as well as a blog search, news search, Yellow Pages, reference search, people search, a search inside of books and an optional database from one of the remaining 300 search engines.

A9's general search engine, Web by Live.com, is not as powerful or comprehensive as Google, but it works fine for your average search. Also, you can supplement it by searching a more specific database at the same time. A9 works best for arts and entertainment searches-books and movies and artsy communities like Creative Commons. But it also includes a jobs-specific search engine called "Indeed Jobs", PubMed (a major medical database) and a NASA database.

While Google may still work best as a global search engine, A9 works better for narrowing down relevant results to a manageable level. Try using first Google and then A9 for a complete search of your subject. This should give you a thorough overview of it on the Internet.