14 DAY TRIAL // Think just Google and Yahoo muscle up on a daily basis and add as many services as they can think of? Not really, Amazon seems to gain some ground by adding a yellow pages section to its portfolio.
The free A9.com site, created by an Amazon subsidiary, went live last September lets people store and search their personal Web browsing and search histories, save and edit bookmarks online for access from any computer, jot notes about sites in a personal diary and get recommendations of sites A9 thinks they might enjoy, based on their surfing habits.
Apparently, this wasn't enough to match the competitor's offer, so they though of a "Yellow Pages" service. It allows users to see storefronts and scroll the streets of 10 cities, like New York, Los Angeles and San Francisco. Soon will also be available snapshots from Atlanta, Boston, Chicago, Dallas, Denver, Seattle and Portland, Oregon. The Amazon work behind this project is huge, think they snapped their way up and down town and came up with about 20 million photographs. It took a few days in each city to gather the images using trucks equipped with digital cameras, global positioning system receivers and proprietary software. This could also turn into a great sight-seeing service for tourists with real low budgets.
However, A9.com is the result of joint efforts, as the search engine links to content stored on Google image servers, book pages from Amazon.com, movie information from the Internet Movie Database and reference information from GuruNet.com.