Online mega-retailer Amazon.com on Wednesday officially unveiled its search site, A9.com, in an effort to move on rivals such as Google, MSN, and Yahoo.
Although available as long ago as April in beta form, A9.com is now live in final form with personalization features including those that keep a running history of searches and let users record notes about any Web page they visit.

Using Google's Web and image search algorithms, and integrating reference results from online library GuruNet and movie listings from the Internet Movie Database (imdb.com), A9 adds its own presentation layer atop the results users typically see from such engines as Google and Yahoo, said Charlene Li, a principal analyst with Forrester Research.

"Call it a 'last mile' analogy," she said. "It doesn't have its own index, but it's much more personal than others. This is the next move in search, and you're going to see this copied by pretty much everybody, especially the 'bookmarks' and 'diary' features."

Unlike traditional browser bookmarks, A9's are stored on Amazon's servers, not the local machine, so they're available from any browser-equipped computer. Its diary feature lets users enter, store, and retrieve notes along with the associated Web site.

A9 organizes results into expandable columns that show "hits" from the Web, Amazon's own for-sale books, imbd.com's movie listings, reference works, and on-the-Internet images.

But not every analyst is sure Amazon's A9 can play with the big boys.

"Although you have to include Amazon as the wild card in commercial search -- they control so many eyeballs and have so many affiliates -- I think they're a little late to the toolbar game," said Tim Hickernell, a vice president and analyst with the Meta Group.

"The search toolbar field is crowded, both figuratively and literally," Hickernell added. "You have to be a pretty dedicated buyer at Amazon to download another."

But while Hickernell has his doubts that A9 will be widely adopted as a primary search engine, he won't discount Amazon's potential for making the site a winner.

"The opportunity is huge once Amazon figures out how to improve the drive for context in searching," he said. "Their 'Inside the Book' search is a perfect example of taking a metaphor from the physical bookstore and translating that into electronic form, that you browse and index or skim a few pages before buying a book. Once they take that to a non-printed media, like the dialog within a movie, and let people search on concepts and topics, they'll really be able to drive sales."

Both Hickernell and Li discounted any problems that A9 might have in establishing itself as an objective search site even though it's a subsidiary of the online world's biggest retailer.

"They have the same challenges as a Google or Yahoo," Hickernell said. "They have to be very clear that some results are sponsored, but I don't think end users are as confused about what's advertising links and what aren't as some studies want us to believe."

An A9 toolbar for Internet Explorer can be downloaded from the company's Web site.