A9.com

A while back, I mentioned Amazon’s new search engine, A9.com. It’s still in beta, but this just might become my new favorite engine.

A9 is powered by Google, which is pretty darn good as far as search engines go. But A9 adds a few enhancements. For example:

• Search history: Your personalized search homepage features links to recent searches. Plus they’re arranged by time period (last 24 hours, last month, etc.)
• Site info: Unfortunately, this doesn’t appear to work in Mozilla 1.6. But it does work in Internet Explorer 6. With this feature, you can find out the site’s traffic rank and response time, and how many sites link to it (according to Alexa).
• Book search You can also perform your search on the text of books in Amazon’s stock. Quite the smart sales strategy, in my opinion.
• And of course, A9 lets you create search shortcuts

The big downside is that you have to sign-in (using your Amazon account) to take advantage of the search history feature. But if you often find yourself repeatedly doing the same searches, it’s worth it.