A9: Searching the Web for Me - How is it Different?
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It's very interesting to note that because of their partnership with Google, the search results you'll get with A9 will be mostly the same as what you would with Google. I say mostly, because it appears that there is a small amount of filtering done on the page results by A9 before surfacing them (SafeSearch is an example of that, it's always on). In fact, you'll also receive a few AdSense ads with your search, as you would expect to with Google.
So why not just keep using Google? Well, A9 has gone the extra mile. Without even logging in (I'll get to that in a bit), you have some very handy features at your fingertips. The more useful features are all magically contained within one little 'site info' button. No doubt you'll feel a sense of shock and amazement at the number of features in this little button, not entirely dissimilar to that feeling you get watching all those clowns pile out of the tiny car.
The 'site info' button allows you to access useful meta data for each site, taken from Alexa (Alexa gathers anonymous web surfing data, and is also owned by Amazon). By simply moving your mouse over the button, you have a non-threatening speech bubble that appears. This bubble tells you the Traffic Rate, the number of sites linking to that site, the loading speed, and how long it has been online. Also, in a very Amazon-esque style, you can also see “People who visit this page also visit:”, and the list of related pages. Finally, a truly useful tool for all those people with the innate desire to be like everyone else in their web-surfing patterns! Oh, and I guess it could come in handy when you want to find other useful sites.
A small but useful feature is the A9 short cut. Every query is simply appended to the URL, like so: “a9.com/what is a dog” This makes it extremely fast to perform a search, as you can just type it into your address bar.
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