Amazon.com Drops Search Engine Features
Amazon.com's A9 Search Engine Drops Highly Touted Features — SEATTLE (AP) — Amazon.com Inc.'s A9 search engine has dropped some of its most widely touted features, including the ability to remember everything a user has ever searched for and a service …
Context & Ripple Effects
A9 had already changed its underlying results supplier in April, when Amazon's Alexa unit moved search results from Google to MSN Live. Removing its search-history memory feature further narrows the set of capabilities A9 controls directly.
The change also lands as Google folds product listings into ordinary web results through its Google Product Results integration, raising the competitive value of search features tailored to shopping.
First-order effects
- A9 users lose the ability to retrieve their prior searches, reducing the service's personalization and recall utility.
- Amazon has fewer distinctive A9 features to pair with results supplied by MSN Live.
Second-order effects
- MSN Live gains greater influence over the A9 experience as Amazon's own feature layer becomes thinner.
- Google's integration of product results into web search makes A9's reduced differentiation more consequential for shoppers comparing general and commerce-oriented search tools.
Third-order effects
- If search providers increasingly bundle product discovery into core results while partner sites shed standalone features, search differentiation shifts toward the firms controlling the results index and shopping data.
The trend: Web search is converging with product discovery, increasing the strategic importance of proprietary results and commerce-focused features.