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Privately held Google won't provide details about its finances, but the company is believed to be profitable, with revenues this year expected to range from $700 million to $1 billion.
No wonder everyone's trying to get on the search bandwagon.
Will we see that Amazon-boost removed? That would be a beautiful thing.
I like it!
[www-1.ibm.com...]
The sources include ... a full crawl of the worldwide web
Too many eggs - too few baskets!
A Google spokesman declined to comment on Amazon's expansion. The two companies have long enjoyed a good working relationship; Amazon even uses Google's search engine on its home page
What working relationship? ;)
Agreed. Not looking forward to optimizing for 3-4 search engines instead of just 1 though.
Oh come now ... that's what a "true" search engine optimizer (SEO) does! Try it ... you'll like it! :)
Its been that long that industry people have forgotten what its like?
Seattle-based Amazon.com has set up a new Silicon Valley startup called "A9" that will develop a commercial search engine and potentially put the company on a collision course with another Internet icon, Google.
Based in Palo Alto, Calif., offices just a few miles from Google's Mountain View headquarters, A9 hopes to launch in October with 30 employees and grow much larger as it develops a search engine that will be licensed to other Web sites, said spokeswoman Alison Diboll.
Unlike Google, A9 isn't trying to develop an all-purpose search engine that indexes billions of Web pages. The startup instead is zeroing in on one of search engines' sweet spots — e-commerce.
[washingtonpost.com...]
Maybe google will finally have some worthy competition?
[query.nytimes.com...]
I don't want to post my own URLs here, but if you're interested, I wrote an opinion on this in my blog at the time...
Amazon.com Invades Google's Turf. [webmasterworld.com]
Dubbed "A9" new search engine will focus on e-commerce. (Sept 26, 2003)
Well, that was what life was like only a few short years ago before Google came to dominate the search market.
[webmasterworld.com...]
Yahoo released their Product Search last week, Froogle has been on the go now for a while and now another big player is stepping in with an E-commerce focussed SE.
I wonder what way this will all pan out. Will A9 be PFI, PPC or free? Will it even get enough traffic to merit attention? Will an Amazon owned subsidiary provide truly unbiased SERP's? Just imagine it, would they really want / allow a competitor to rank higher for "DVD's", "book store" or "CDs" for example?
I'd welcome others too, but they'd probably all end up consolidating to about two or three major players... wait a sec, isn't that what he have now? Damn that pesky market equilibrium. :D
More competition is good for the consumer, but I don't think most competitors of Google have the resources to really make an impact. Amazon is one of the few companies out there that CAN break into the market, so good on them.
I think we will see more of this from retail companies, although I'm not sure I would trust them to deliver impartial results. I'm already seeing a lot of traffic from bots, though, and I can see this getting worse if a lot of smaller players join in. Although individually they don't suck much bandwidth, if every large company gets in on it we could have a crawler jam.
Unlike Google, A9 isn't trying to develop an all-purpose search engine that indexes billions of Web pages. The startup instead is zeroing in on one of search engines' sweet spots — e-commerce.
Sounds like pay per click and/or pay for placement. If so, I doubt Google will loose any sleep.
Dave
Have you already seen the AMZN spider?
any relation with this one:
amzn_assoc spidering my site
