Amazon A9 Search Engine Makes Changes
Amazon’s A9 Search Engine has made some changes to its search result display and personalization tools, including new support for the Opera 8.0 browser. One added change I really do not understand as to why they are recommending is for faster service to turn off personalization : “The home page is now much smaller and loads faster, especially if your personalized tools are turned off.”
I mean, besides Local Search, is not personalization the key reason to using A9? If not, wouldn’t one just use Google? Amazon’s A9 lists the changes made to the new Beta version of the search engine:
* More Intuitive Search Column Selection: The buttons on the right have been replaced with checkboxes on the top. These checkboxes let you choose what to search. The checkboxes appear not only on the search results page, but also on the home page, so you can decide in advance what to search.
* Location Search: The Yellow Pages location box opens automatically if you check the Yellow Pages checkbox. This lets you enter the location before you search.
* Easier Access to Additional Search Columns: In addition to checkboxes for the default set of searches, a “More Choices” dropdown provides easy access to additional searches. (The contents of this menu will change over time.) You can also use the menu to access over 100 additional OpenSearch columns.
* Personalized Tools on the Home Page: Your History, Your Bookmarks, Your Diary, and Discover are not shown on the home page unless you turn them on. These tools are only shown when you are signed in.
* Single Column Mode: You can now set a preference to show only one column at a time, instead of showing multiple columns. You can enable this on the preferences page by selecting “Only one column can be open”. Only signed in users can change their preferences.
* Drag and Drop Changes: Drag and Drop to the bookmarks column is off by default on the search results page. Drag and Drop allows links from other columns to be dragged into the bookmarks column, making it easy to make any search result into a bookmark. However, some users found that it interfered with built in browser drag and drop which allows dragging links to other browsers. You can turn Drag and Drop on in the preferences page or at the bottom of the Your Bookmarks column.
