A9.com is a former subsidiary of Amazon that develops search engine and

search advertising In Internet marketing, search advertising is a method of placing online advertisements on web pages that show results from search engine queries. Through the same search-engine advertising services, ads can also be placed on Web pages with other pu ...

technology. A9 is based in

Palo Alto, California Palo Alto (; Spanish for "tall stick") is a charter city in the northwestern corner of Santa Clara County, California, United States, in the San Francisco Bay Area, named after a coastal redwood tree known as El Palo Alto. The city was es ...

, with teams in

Seattle Seattle ( ) is a seaport city on the West Coast of the United States. It is the seat of King County, Washington. With a 2020 population of 737,015, it is the largest city in both the state of Washington and the Pacific Northwest regio ...

Bangalore Bangalore (), List of renamed places in India, officially Bengaluru (), is the Capital city, capital and largest city of the Indian state of Karnataka. It has a population of more than and a metropolitan area, metropolitan population of a ...

, Beijing,

Dublin Dublin (; , or ) is the capital and largest city of Ireland. On a bay at the mouth of the River Liffey, it is in the province of Leinster, bordered on the south by the Dublin Mountains, a part of the Wicklow Mountains range. At the 2016 c ...

, Iași, Munich and

Tokyo Tokyo (; ja, 東京, , ), officially the Tokyo Metropolis ( ja, 東京都, label=none, ), is the capital and List of cities in Japan, largest city of Japan. Formerly known as Edo, its metropolitan area () is the most populous in the world, ...

. A9 has development efforts in areas of product search, cloud search, visual search, augmented reality, advertising technology and community question answering.

History

A9, a subsidiary of

Amazon.com Amazon.com, Inc. ( ) is an American multinational technology company focusing on e-commerce, cloud computing, online advertising, digital streaming, and artificial intelligence. It has been referred to as "one of the most influential econo ...

, was founded in 2003 with an exclusive focus on producing technology for search and advertising. They moved into the building previously used by the

DEC Systems Research Center The Systems Research Center (SRC) was a research laboratory created by Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) in 1984, in Palo Alto, California. DEC SRC was founded by a group of computer scientists, led by Robert Taylor, who left the Computer ...

. One purpose of A9.com was to leverage

algorithm In mathematics and computer science, an algorithm () is a finite sequence of rigorous instructions, typically used to solve a class of specific problems or to perform a computation. Algorithms are used as specifications for performing ...

s, and the name was chosen as a numeronym to represent that word (i.e. 'A' + 9 other letters). The office was in

Silicon Valley Silicon Valley is a region in Northern California that serves as a global center for high technology and innovation. Located in the southern part of the San Francisco Bay Area, it corresponds roughly to the geographical areas San Mateo Coun ...

, near Stanford University. Under the direction of its first president,

Udi Manber Udi Manber ( he, אודי מנבר) is an Israeli computer scientist. He is one of the authors of agrep and GLIMPSE. After a career in engineering and management, he worked on medical research. Education He earned both his bachelor's degree in 19 ...

, A9 focused on several areas, including the A9.com destination website, product search, and a search advertising platform. Some early A9 services such as "search inside the book" continued, while others have been discontinued. The A9 search engine powers product search for Amazon.com and several other eCommerce retailers. In February 2006, Manber was replaced by David L. Tennenhouse as president. In September 2006, William Stasior, one of A9's founders and a former

AltaVista AltaVista was a Web search engine established in 1995. It became one of the most-used early search engines, but lost ground to Google and was purchased by Yahoo! in 2003, which retained the brand, but based all AltaVista searches on its own sear ...

and Amazon.com executive, was named president. In June 2009, A9 acquired SnapTell, which developed smartphone-based visual search applications. Stasior left in October 2012 to join

Apple Inc. Apple Inc. is an American multinational technology company headquartered in Cupertino, California, United States. Apple is the largest technology company by revenue (totaling in 2021) and, as of June 2022, is the world's biggest company ...

to work on

Siri Siri ( ) is a virtual assistant that is part of Apple Inc.'s iOS, iPadOS, watchOS, macOS, tvOS, and audioOS operating systems. It uses voice queries, gesture based control, focus-tracking and a natural-language user interface to answer qu ...

. Brian Pinkerton, who had developed

WebCrawler WebCrawler is a search engine, and one of the oldest surviving search engines on the web today. For many years, it operated as a metasearch engine. WebCrawler was the first web search engine to provide full text search. History Brian Pinkerto ...

in the 1990s, became general manager of A9 in 2012. In 2019, after reporting from ''

The Wall Street Journal ''The Wall Street Journal'' is an American business-focused, international daily newspaper based in New York City, with international editions also available in Chinese and Japanese. The ''Journal'', along with its Asian editions, is published ...

'' revealed that Amazon had changed its search algorithm to favor more profitable products, Amazon took down the A9.com site and pointed the domain name to Amazon's home page.

Past projects

A9.com search portal

A9.com originally operated a search portal, along with an A9

toolbar The toolbar, also called a bar or standard toolbar (originally known as ribbon) is a graphical control element on which on-screen icons can be used. A toolbar often allows for quick access to functions that are commonly used in the program. Some ...

, which was first demonstrated on April 14, 2004. The service featured some innovative design elements, allowing users to choose from over 400 sources to search and view results in separate columns grouped by source. In addition to web search results, users could get product search results from Amazon, encyclopedia results from

Wikipedia Wikipedia is a multilingual free online encyclopedia written and maintained by a community of volunteers, known as Wikipedians, through open collaboration and using a wiki-based editing system. Wikipedia is the largest and most-read refer ...

, movie information from

IMDb IMDb (an abbreviation of Internet Movie Database) is an online database of information related to films, television series, home videos, video games, and streaming content online – including cast, production crew and personal biographies, ...

, and others, starting in September 2004. Web search results were provided by different search engines over time. The search portal functionality was discontinued in 2008.

OpenSearch

A9 developed a protocol called OpenSearch that enabled the "plug-in" search source functionality from the A9.com portal. The original specification, OpenSearch 1.0, was released in March 2005. A9 made the protocol freely available through a Creative Commons license.

BlockView

A9 developed the first service that allowed users of maps and " yellow pages" (a

telephone directory A telephone directory, commonly called a telephone book, telephone address book, phonebook, or the white and yellow pages, is a listing of telephone subscribers in a geographical area or subscribers to services provided by the organization that ...

) to view buildings at street level. Called BlockView, the service was announced in January 2005. Within a year, the service included images for 24 US cities. Both BlockView and maps (as well as support for the A9 tool bar) were discontinued in September 2006.

Clickriver

In November 2006, A9 announced Clickriver, an advertising program that let third parties place advertisements on Amazon.com pages. Clickriver focused primarily on products and services that complemented Amazon's own offerings. For example, if a customer viewed a television on Amazon, a Clickriver ad might offer installation services in his or her local area. Clickriver was discontinued in 2010, replaced by other Amazon advertising programs.

Community question answering

A9 operated Askville, a community-based question-and-answer site first tested in December 2006. Service began in November 2007. Compared with other question-and-answer sites, Askville focused more on social interaction, allowing users to follow other users as well as track specific topics. On October 25, 2013, Askville was shut down.

CloudSearch

CloudSearch is a managed

Amazon Web Services Amazon Web Services, Inc. (AWS) is a subsidiary of Amazon that provides on-demand cloud computing platforms and APIs to individuals, companies, and governments, on a metered pay-as-you-go basis. These cloud computing web services provide d ...

service that makes client data searchable. For example, a business that wanted to allow customers to search their catalog could upload the catalog entries to CloudSearch and then route search requests from their application or web site to the service. CloudSearch instances could be brought online as data or traffic volume demanded. Sites using CloudSearch included

SmugMug SmugMug is a paid image sharing, image hosting service, and online video platform on which users can upload photos and videos. The company also facilitates the sale of digital and print media for amateur and professional photographers. On Apri ...

, and Sage Bionetworks. In March 2014, Amazon moved away from using A9 for CloudSearch to technology based on

Apache Solr Solr (pronounced "solar") is an open-source enterprise-search platform, written in Java. Its major features include full-text search, hit highlighting, faceted search, real-time indexing, dynamic clustering, database integration, NoSQL features a ...

Recent projects

Product search

A9 continued to develop and operate the service that provides search on all nine Amazon.com sites, as well as other retail sites owned by Amazon such as Endless.com, Javari.de, and

Audible.com Audible is an American online audiobook and podcast service that allows users to purchase and stream audiobooks and other forms of spoken word content. This content can be purchased individually or under a subscription model where the user receiv ...

. In addition, A9 search is also used by other retailers, such as Marks & Spencer, that license the Amazon retail platform for their online presence. A9 provided the "search inside the book" capability for Amazon. Announced in 2003, this service allows customers to search through the full text of hundreds of thousands of books. This feature is available both for searching individual books and for the entire book catalog.

Visual search

The visual search group at A9 created mobile applications that recognize objects and allow users to find these products on Amazon.com. Their first augmented reality app, Flow, provided both object and barcode recognition. It was released in 2011. A9 visual search technology powers features to let customers search for certain products (such as shoes) by shape, and find visually similar items on Amazon.com, Zappos.com, Endless.com, and other retail sites.

Advertising technology

A9's advertising technology group began delivering sponsored link advertisements on the Amazon.com retail Web site in 2003 and continued to manage this program for Amazon properties. A9 also invests in display advertising technology, including technology for Amazon's ad-supported e-reader, the Kindle with special offers.

References

External links

* {{DEFAULTSORT:A9.Com Internet search engines Amazon (company) Internet properties established in 2004 Web mapping Creative Commons-licensed authors