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Amazon.com has axed a number of features on its A9 search engine as part of a redesign of www.a9.com, an Amazon.com spokesman said on Monday.

Amazon.com has dropped support for the A9 toolbar, yellow pages, search history, diary and bookmarks tools, as well as its maps tools, including its street-level mapping feature.

Meanwhile, the new redesigned interface launched Friday offers new ways to search sources and a continuous scrolling feature that eliminates the need to hit "next" to see results on additional pages.

"A9 is shifting its priorities to areas where it … Read more

Under a bill President Bush signed into law on Tuesday, Americans will soon be able to easily find out where about $1 trillion in government spending goes.

The law, called the Federal Funding Accountability and Transparecy Act of 2006, calls for the creation of a Web site this year that lists federal grants and contracts greater than $25,000, except for ones that are classified for national security reasons, according to an Associated Press article.

The Web site will allow people to type in the name of any company, association, state or locality and find out what government grants and … Read more

As expected, AOL has been sued over its online release of data on the Internet searches of more than 650,000 members in late July. A lawsuit seeking class action status was filed against AOL on Friday in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California.

The lawsuit (click here for PDF) accuses AOL of violating the Electronic Communications Privacy Act and of fraudulent and deceptive business practices, among other claims, and seeks at least $5,000 for every person whose search data was exposed.

No AOL user names were attached to the database, but the lawsuit … Read more

AOL will hire its first chief privacy officer. This comes a month after it announced that two of its employees were fired and the chief technology officer resigned over the release of Web search data from more than 600,000 AOL members.

The release of the data, for scientific purposes, prompted widespread criticism from privacy advocates and Congress and could lead to an FTC complaint.

AOL announced that it would hire a chief privacy officer, but didn't say when or who, in a company-wide memo from Chief Executive Jonathan Miller, according to an Associated Press article published on SiliconValley.… Read more

After listening to two different talks at the annual Space 2006 conference this week--one featuring Google's director of research, Peter Norvig, and another by NASA Ames' director of strategic relationships, Chris Kemp--it's easy to surmise that the search and science alliance between Google and NASA is slow going.

Both Norvig and Kemp separately alluded to difficulty in the Google-NASA partnership, which was grandly announced in September 2005 by Google Chief Eric Schmidt and has yet to produce a so-called Space Act contract that would outline forward-looking joint projects. (Kemp said the Space Act was close to being finalized, … Read more

Google, whose U.S. search market share slipped slightly in July, was back up in August, according to two providers of Web site statistics.

According to Nielsen/NetRatings figures released on Tuesday, Google has 50.2 percent of the U.S. search market. That's up from 49.2 percent in July (which had slipped slightly from 49.4 percent in June after nearly a year of monthly rises). Google had more than 3 billion search queries in August, the Nielsen/NetRatings statistics show.

Behind Google were Yahoo with 24 percent market share, MSN/Windows Live Search with 10 percent, … Read more

If pictures are worth a thousand words, logos must be worth at least a few hundred. That seems to be the logic behind the Web 2.0 trend of aggregating company information through their nameplates alone.

Go2Web20.net, which bills itself as "the complete Web 2.0 directory," provides corporate data through tons of logos all on a single page. We think the value of such sites is dubious, but if you do decide to visit Go2Web20.net, we offer this advice: Don't try downloading this page on a dial-up connection.

As the battles escalate among text and photo aggregation sites, competition is just beginning to heat up in video.

VideoSift and Viral Video Chart are examples of two approaches that have emerged in this space. The latter, which just launched, appears to use a more traditional method of indexing to scan "several million blogs a day to see which online videos people are talking about the most."

VideoSift, by contrast, is an open-source system based on submissions by its members. Viewers vote for their favorites--whether they be on YouTube, MySpace, Google Videos or anywhere else--and the highest-ranked videos … Read more

Try as we might, we just can't seem to get away from posts involving Web 2.0 logos. Here, Steve Rubel of Micro Persuasion has an item on something called Web2Logo.com.

The "visual front end" for the Web2.0List shared database, as Rubel describes it, provides a way to search for news and background information about a company simply by clicking on its logo. This is probably most useful if you're already familiar at least with the names of the companies you're looking up, but it still serves to exemplify an emerging technology seeking … Read more