A9 was created by Amazon.com in 2003 as an independent company aimed at producing technology for search and advertising. The A9.com search portal was officially launched the 14th of April 2004 and it represented a true innovation in the world of information extraction and web search.
For the first time the Amazon’s service introduced a real innovative SERP that allowed users to choose from over 400 sources from one single interface and allowed users to search and explore results in separate columns grouped by source.
Most importantly and particularly inspiring – for the Semantic Web community – In addition to web search results, users could get in the SERP encyclopedia results from Wikipedia, movie information from IMDb, and of course product search results from Amazon. Sadly the service was discontinued in 2008 but we believe it has been foundational for the creation of Amazon Alexa.