Amazon Watch

Amazon's new search engine a9.com is committed to tracking everything you do, and saving all of it forever in your very own personally-identifiable profile that you cannot delete. Read their scary privacy policy.

Everything you do at a9.com is saved and integrated with everything you've ever done at Amazon.com. Amazon's profiling agenda is designed to lay the foundation for personalized search. When you log into Amazon, they immediately suggest some books to purchase. This is only a tiny taste of where Amazon wants to go with their profiling software.

"A9.com remembers your information so you don't have to. You can keep your own notes about any web page and search them; it is a new way to store and organize your bookmarks; it even recommends new sites and favorite old sites specifically for you to visit. With the A9 Toolbar installed your web browsing history will be saved so you can search through your whole history (and clear items you don't want kept). A9.com uses your history to recommend new sites, to alert you to new search results, and to let you know the last time you visited a page."

The public rationale for this is that all searchers want better relevancy, and the best way to do this is for engines to know more about the searcher. The private, real reason for this is that advertisers will pay top dollar for ads targeted to a user's interests, which will make the search engines even richer. In fact, the public rationale is not at all convincing. By adding a single word to your search term, you can specify what you are trying to find much more accurately than any data that any engine can pull up from your profile. If search engines spent more time showing users how to search intelligently, and less time collecting personal data, their push toward personalized search might be easier to justify.

However, Amazon also offers http://generic.a9.com for those who don't want to be tracked. It lacks some features, but it does show web links and snippets from books. Which to choose was an easy decision for us.