web A9 sucks now. When did that happen?

Posted May 19, 2006 • Comments Off on A9 sucks now. When did that happen?

For what seems like it must be a couple years now, I’ve used and enjoyed the A9 toolbar. It keeps a really great search history and it gives a small discount on Amazon purchases and it’s just generally inoffensive. However, some time in the last couple of weeks, it ceased being useful and inoffensive.

It no longer gives me web results that fit my needs.

It no longer even HAS an image search function.

At first, I thought my browser was broken. Surely it was a mistake somewhere that “Images” and “Web” were no longer options you could choose for A9 columns. “Wikipedia,” the only other column I ever used, was still there, so surely the two most basic features of ANY search engine hadn’t been removed!

This article http://news.softpedia.com/news/Windows-Live-More-Powerful-A9-Ditches-Google-22553.shtml seems to explain why. I found this article with Google; the same search terms on A9 gave me nothing.

A9 has no “contact us” link. I did complain, disingenuously, on their “Feedback” page, but they don’t reply to those.

I still love Amazon, and it was always neat and amusing to get that 1.57% off every purchase for using their search engine. But a search engine whose results are of poorer quality than I’m used to, that proclaims “Windows Live!” every time I do a search (I haven’t used Windows in two years), and that doesn’t even OFFER to search for images for me, is ridiculous.

So so long to A9. I’m really going to miss how well it used to work before they broke it for no reason.