Marketing With Amazon's A9 Search Portal

Amazon got the search world buzzing with the launch of their new search portal A9, but how will this new service affect the way that your customers interact with your brand? Discuss ResearchShelf reported, "either the page estimate numbers are off (not unlikely), or what's more likely is A9 is not licensing the entire Google database. It also appears that a9 uses a default 'family filter.'" Over to the right of the web search results are two columns, which open into the two other result sets. You can close any column at any time, and have multiple columns open at once. The second column shows books from an Amazon search on your keywords (watch for an expansion into Amazon products soon), and the third column shows, if you're logged in, your search history. It's this search history that has search maestro John Battelle excited, "having your entire search and click history, and if you use the Toolbar, your entire browsing history as well, available on a server side application opens up all sorts of new approaches to solving search, research, and recall problems." Will this search and click history be enough of a draw to wrench searchers away from Google? Not right away, and Amazon will have to do a much better job of reaching the mass search audience. Perhaps because it's in beta they haven't put it on their Amazon front page yet. When it does catch on, those who use it are likely to be serious shoppers who want to keep track of where they've been in a sort of customized store as well as academic/business researchers who use the history tracking to remind themselves where they saw particular bits of data. Those using the A9 search for its functionality are serious about buying books and finding information, which means web marketers should - yes - write a book relating to your keywords and sell it on Amazon. What keywords do you rank well for? Put them in your title. Write your book. Then head over to Amazon's publisher's page. And don't forget that Amazon sells ebooks - if you've written any they should be in Amazon regardless of the A9 search portal. If you already have a book for sale in Amazon, your next task is to synch up the terms your book appears for on Amazon with those that your site appears for in Google. For example, Shari Thurow's "Search Engine Visibility" is the #1 result in Amazon for the term "search engine web design," while her site is not in the top ten in the web search results. Not that there are many searches for the term "search engine web design," but you get the idea - rank well for the same terms in Amazon and in Google. (And thanks to Shari for being a subject in my demonstration.) So what else besides synching your book search terms and site search terms is there for marketers? Watch A9 - closely. They broke news of the beta on Battelle's search blog, indicating that it's more of a conversation piece now than a driving force for their company. When you start seeing A9 ads on television it might be a good idea to get started writing that ebook. Garrett French is the editor of murdok's eBusiness channel. You can talk to him directly at