Content
A9.com just relaunched their homepage with a slick new redesign.
The new design focuses on the essentials of search and offers a much faster, much more intuitive experience for the user. Gone are some of the supplemental services, such as bookmarks and diary, but in their place is are new “search groups” and a renewed focus on finding information fast. Also included is the best implementation of a “infinite scroll” technique for search results that I’ve seen on the web.
I think the focus on core search is a good one. And A9 still supports OpenSearch, so third parties can continue to launch their own search engine at A9.com. (The OpenSearch pages now redirect to the community site, which is great, too!)
The look and feel is an improvement, and one that I’m happy to see. I’m impressed with the team for pulling this off.
October 2nd, 2006 at 12:28 pm
I loved the Diary. (And the Toolbar and the A9 rewards.) I used the Diary as searchable bookmarks — it was fantastic. It allowed my to apply a “Search, don’t sort” strategy to my bookmarks. Searching my Diary was much easier than trying to organize my bookmark collection. And it allowed me to write some notes about each page — kind of a poor man’s annotation feature. Confusingly A9 also offered an awkward Bookmarks feature — I bet many users tried using that to organize their bookmarks and didn’t think to try the diary feature for this purpose. I wish A9 had promoted it more as a bookmarking replacement — it could have caught on as a killer feature. The word “Diary” didn’t really match its function as a scratchpad for taking notes about specific web pages.
Does anybody have a recommendation to replace the A9 Diary feature? Something that will allow me to write short notes about each web page I find interesting and automatically pop-up these notes the next time I visit that web page? And allow me to apply a “Search, don’t sort” strategy to bookmarking. Integration into the A9 search interface would be a plus.
October 2nd, 2006 at 12:50 pm
Allen, have you seen Google Notebook?
October 2nd, 2006 at 12:53 pm
Or, use del.icio.us like I do, and keep a note along with each page you tag.
October 6th, 2006 at 4:33 am
I used both the diary and the bookmarks, and found them both useful.
While maintaining and using A9 bookmarks was not as smooth as maintaining and using a browser’s own bookmarks, that was more than offset by the convenience of only having to maintain them in one place instead of the multiple PCs and browsers that I use, and having them available from any web-connected device even without the toolbar.
And A9 bookmarks were better than Google bookmarks, which last I checked don’t support subfolders.
Any recommendation for bookmark plugins?