Now Amazon Wants To Take On Google
from the add-another-one-to-the-bunch dept
There have been a bunch of stories focusing on the "battle for search" focusing on Google, Yahoo and Microsoft (who hasn't even entered the race yet). You might want to update that list. The Wall Street Journal is reporting that Amazon is getting into the search game. They've quietly (whoops, not any more) set up a subsidiary named A9 in Silicon Valley to deal with the competitive threat they face from folks shopping via search engines. The article is fairly vague and say that the technology won't be for a general search engine, but will be aimed at online shoppers specifically. I'm sure more details will start coming out soon enough. Of course, I remember about five years ago, Amazon bought one of the first comparison shopping engines, Junglee, and everyone was wondering what they would do with it (it turned out they killed it - though, who knows if they ended up using some of the technology internally). Could it be that Amazon is trying to get back into the comparison shopping business? Update: Well, this is great. Over at the Register they discovered that if you do a Google search on Udi Manber the guy in charge of A9, it turns up an advertisement for Google Jobs. It appears that Google is trying to swipe potential employees out from under A9.
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