Amazon Launches A9 Number one of the Seven reasons you should use A9 is that Amazon's Search Inside the Book runs concurrently with all your web searches. Just resize the search panes and you can see results from both indexes. This is pretty cool -- after all, most of the world's knowledge is NOT yet on the web, but rather it's on paper. (Paper that's convieniently packaged in book form and available for sale at Amazon.com!) When I first saw the beta internally a few weeks ago, I was astonished that the search results were powered by Google. Astonished because every article I had read on the subject of Amazon's spinoff A9 emphasized the "Amazon versus Google" angle and now evidently A9 has decided to just buy the web results from Google rather than "compete." Reflecting further on this, now that A9 has launched, I think this strategy of "extend rather that compete" makes a lot of sense. It would take an enormous amount of resources to catch up to Google w.r.t. web search. Why should Amazon try to enter web search when all we want to do is sell you stuff? And I think that goal is nicely accomplished by the "Search Inside the Book" results right there in the next column. I think I'll try this as my primary search engine for a while and see if occasionally a SITB result comes up that catches my eye. I guess this is another reason A9 decided to use Google results -- current Google users have nothing to lose by switching to A9 as their primary search engine because the web results should be the same, plus you get SITB! Congratulations A9! Update:Slashdot linked to somebody with a way better A9 analysis