Searching with A9 button bars

A9 -- Amazon and Alexa have shared technology that promises to change the face of the search engine world. It's called A9 and it offers an impressive range of information. If you have more than one Amazon identity, you can log in several times and see search streams related to specific areas that you have explored. You get normal web information--text and images--crawled by Google. You also get information from Amazon's books. Plus, you share information from the searches done by others. This is as remarkable as it is scary.

But it looks well. You see information in each window pane by pressing a rectangular button on the right side of the page. When you search with at least two panes open at once, you are in a totally different part of the search engine galaxy than where Google travels.

You need to see the system operating before you decide to change to A9. This is a technology that will change the way people search the internet.

By switching between A9 identity, you could be a developer on one occasion and a home user on another.

This concept is related to work TSSG has done on distributed Resource Discovery Systems in the EU-funded Gestalt and Guardians projects. As Micheal O Foghlu explains

In these projects the primary focus was on discovering re-usable on-line e-Learning content modules , and various types of XML metadata were used to describe these modules (IEEE LOM and others), and to describe the users, and to describe the devices. The architecture, however, is applicable to pretty much any form on-line content. The public results of the Guardians project can be downloaded from Guardians Public Downloads.

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Extracted from "Inside View" in the Irish Examiner, September 24 2004.
Micheal O Foghlu -- "Search profiles, metadata and resource discovery"
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