Jefflog

Amazon recently took the beta label off of it’s A9 meta-search engine. It’s using a good dose of Javascript to make the search quite dynamic. Nothing terribly revolutionary, since all it does it accumulate search results from various different search engines (Google, IMDB, and of course Amazon.com, among others), but the interface is slick, and being able to see side-by-side searches for web pages and images is quite cool.

The system also keeps a complete history of your searches, which might be useful to some, but is also downright freaky considering that they can link that information to your Amazon.com account. (If you’ve logged into Amazon.com recently and navigate to A9 for the first time, the system will identify you by name.)

Something else that I discovered today is that if you use A9 to search, then go to the Amazon.com page, you’ll see a notice about π/2 at the top. Clicking on this brings up the following information:

Jeff Seifert, since you’ve been using A9.com recently, virtually everything at Amazon.com is automatically an additional π/2% (1.57%) off for you. Collecting this discount is zero effort on your part. It will be applied automatically at checkout.

[...]

How can we afford this additional π/2% discount?

Because of sponsored links (the small text-based ads you see on search results pages), web search has turned into a highly profitable business. The search engines are making a significant amount of money every time someone clicks on one of those ads. With our automatic π/2% discount, we are effectively sharing with you some of the money we collect from sponsored links, i.e. sharing the pi.

(Nice geek touch with the π, by the way.)