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Weekly News Digest

September 20, 2004 — In addition to this week's NewsBreaks article and the monthly NewsLink Spotlight, Information Today, Inc. (ITI) offers Weekly News Digests that feature recent product news and company announcements. Watch for additional coverage to appear in the next print issue of Information Today. CLICK HERE to view more Weekly News Digest items.

Amazon Launches A9.com Search Site

A9.com, Inc., a subsidiary of Amazon.com, Inc., has launched A9.com (http://a9.com) to make searching the Internet more effective. The new site builds on a beta test version the company introduced in April 2004 (see the NewsBreak at http://newsbreaks.infotoday.com/nbreader.asp?ArticleID=16464) that offered Google searching of the Web combined with searches of Amazon's books and site information from Amazon's subsidiary, Alexa Internet. The official launch of A9.com adds several information sources and new search and organizational features. The company says the new site is more of an information management tool.

A9.com now offers users search results from five information sources, which are presented through selectable and adjustable columns: Web and image search provided by Google, book text of more than 100,000 titles from Amazon.com's Search Inside the Book, movie information from the Internet Movie Database, and reference information (encyclopedia, dictionary, etc.) through GuruNet.com. Additionally, A9.com is a search engine with a memory, since it returns results from the user's information. So with every search, users will see results from their own history, bookmarks, and diary.

A9's Diary allows users to record, save, and reference notes about any Web page they visit. Discover, a new feature that is still in beta, presents users with both recommended sites based on their own surfing history (similar to the recommendations provided at Amazon.com) as well as different views of their history, such as most-frequently-visited sites. A9.com will be testing new Discover features and making changes to recommendations based on user feedback.

Source: A9.com, Inc.