Testing out A9.com

Amazon has a new search engine thingie called A9 (A9.com). It has two attempted improvements over the Google formula -- one is, it keeps your search history and aims to use it to improve the results of your searches. Also, it integrates Amazon's "Look Inside the Book."

So far, the latter aspect has been the more interesting. For instance, try a search for 'Bhangra'. You get the usual results on the main search (apparently they are using Google for the basic search algorithm -- at least for now). But if you turn on the "Look inside the book" bar, you get all these interesting references to books. It turns out there are dozens of references to Bhangra in Tanuja Desai Hidier's book Born Confused. Bhangra also shows up in the Vibe History of Hip Hop. Interesting...