I want Amazon’s A9 search engine to succeed. Because I like that Bezos & Co. are trying new things in search, ranging from an interesting interface to a pluggable architecture that supports syndication.
But here’s my problem: I never use A9. I can literally cluster my usage around A9 announcements. I used it a few times when it was launched; I used it a few more times when Jeff launched the plug-in search architecture at O’Reilly’s ETech back in March. I used it a couple more times earlier this week while reminding myself that I never use A9.
So, am I representative of other search users? And if so, is A9 failing?
I supposed it depends on what Amazon wanted from A9, and how quickly it wanted those things to happen. Because as the following chart shows, as evidenced by adoption of Amazon’s plug-in architecture the site’s extensibility isn’t lighting people on fire. I parsed the company’s new plug-in page, and then sorted and binned things by date:
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