Like a lot of people, I played around with A9.com, the search engine from Amazon.com, when it first came out. It was neat, but I quickly forgot about it since I use Google pretty exclusively for web searching.
Then Goggle Maps came out, and wow! I played with that one too. But I keep using Google Maps, unlike A9. Though, I must admit, I think I confused the fuctionality in A9 with what is available on Google Maps.
Well, I was just looking at my Amazon.com shopping cart, and I see that they have started a clever little marketing ploy to increase the use of A9. I can save $1.37 on my Amazon.com orders if I use A9 on a regular basis. WOW! Now, I am just enough of a cheapskate to do that. (Goodness knows how long it's been up there.)
But, I don't know that I really would use it enough to qualify for the continued discount. And like, what kind of searches do I need to do? I'm sure someone out there has written a script to search on A9 at regular intervals for random words in the dictionary. How would they tell? Will there be Amazon Hacking now? People trying to pump up their discounts "artificially?" I can't be the first person to think about this.
Hrm... I wonder how long this will last? It did get me to install the A9 toolbar on Firefox though. Maybe I'll finally be able to keep straight the difference between A9 and Google Maps. Or maybe I'll just go back to my Google-only habits. *shrug*
