A9.com

A9.com was a former subsidiary of Amazon that developed search engine and search advertising technology. A9 was based in Palo Alto, California, with teams in Seattle, Bangalore, Beijing, Dublin, Iași, Munich and Tokyo. A9 has development efforts in areas of product search, cloud search, visual search, augmented reality, advertising technology and community question answering. A9, a subsidiary of Amazon.com, was founded in 2003 with an exclusive focus on producing technology for search and advertising. They moved into the building previously used by the DEC Systems Research Center in Palo Alto, California. One purpose of A9.com was to leverage algorithms, and the name was chosen as a numeronym to represent that word (i.e. 'A' + 9 other letters). The office was in Silicon Valley, near Stanford University. Under the direction of its first president, Udi Manber, A9 focused on several areas, including the A9.com destination website, product search, and a search advertising platform. Some early A9 services such as "search inside the book" continued, while others have been discontinued. The A9 search engine powered product search for Amazon.com and several other eCommerce retailers. In February 2006, Manber was replaced by David L. Tennenhouse as president. In September 2006, William Stasior, one of A9's founders and a former AltaVista and Amazon.com executive, was named president. In June 2009, A9 acquired SnapTell, which developed smartphone-based visual search applications. Stasior left in October 2012 to join Apple Inc. to work on Siri. Brian Pinkerton, who had developed WebCrawler in the 1990s, became general manager of A9 in 2012. In 2019, after reporting from The Wall Street Journal revealed that Amazon had changed its search algorithm to favor more profitable products, Amazon took down the A9.com site and pointed the domain name to Amazon's home page. A9.com originally operated a search portal, along with an A9 toolbar, which was first demonstrated on April 14, 2004.