A9.com - Not Quite Fixed Yet

Well I decided to revisit good ol' A9.com - sort of a follow up of my original Amazon's A9.com Show Adult Images post.

A search for "Latinas" pulls up adult images, starting on page one, and gets pretty raunchy in pages 2 and 3.

Below, a screen cap of the last image for the page for "latinas" search (censor bar added by me).

So when is A9 going to fix this? Is it an impossible task?

Time will tell.

Yahoo Creeps Ever Closer To The Google Cachet

Is Yahoo lockstepped in a Follow-The-Leader death march?

First Yahoo stripped down their search.yahoo.com home page to what could only be referred to as a "Google-like" simplicity.

Then they changed from their "classic" twenty results per page to ten.(Well, that was probably to increase their Overture PPC ads exposure on the flagship site, understandable and forgiveable).

But now, for the first time in Yahoo history, their logo has been "seasonalized", just like... Google.

To me this means the Google is really hurting Yahoo, and they're running scared.

When the Google IPO was imminent, people speculated that Google's policy making decisions would be hampered and become more... Yahoo-like.

Where is Yahoo's innovation? "Search is search", you say, "Who cares if they started making holiday logos"? Take a look at Amazon's A9 - tons of new and innovative personalization features that many SE experts feel are the future of search... and the punchline is all these new features are layered on top of Google's existing technology.

More than anything this latest Yahoo stunt, reminds me of Altavista's failed Google knock-off - RagingSearch.com (link is to archive.org, since the domain is now a squatted PPC directory feed). Irony, noted, naturally.... Altavista.com went through a series of ownership changes, and is now owned by none-other than Yahoo, Inc.

What is evident is that Yahoo is trying hard to grab some of Google's "mindshare". If Yahoo wants to truly compete with Google (and any future competitors) it is going to take a lot more than a spooky Halloween themed animated gif.