Amazon's new offering manages searches.

With its new startup, A9.com, Amazon.corn has stepped into the search engine wars.

A9's free search service features advanced technology it says will take searches beyond mere retrieval of Web pages to let users more fully manage the information they find. The service offers users the ability to store and edit bookmarks on a central server computer, keep track of each link clicked on previous visits to a Web page, and even make personal notes on those pages for viewing on subsequent visits. It has been called a "search engine with memory" by computer scientists.

A9 currently offers a search demonstration page, which is limited to recording a history of Web searches. The new service will eventually go much further, adding the ability to organize and retrieve past searches. The idea is to enable more useful searching by making it easier to remember where a Web browser has gone before. A9 enables users to run a single query and see matching information from multiple sources, including GuruNet dictionary and encyclopedia, Amazon's "search the book" database of full-text book pages, and Web images from Google.

A9's service goes beyond search capability, however--it's about managing information, it contends. Initially, A9 will focus on managing information like bookmarks and search history. The service will include a Web browser tool bar with innovative features such as the ability to create instant lists from individual Web pages and then use the lists to move among those pages. It will also offer a home page giving users the ability to edit and move Web links easily for later retrieval. The A9 site will also offer a "discovery" feature that suggests Web sites that users may find interesting based oil their searches, a feature similar to product recommendation features offered on Amazon.com.

The service stores a lot of information for users and lets them access it from any computer at any time. The attraction of A9 is the personalized extras and the unusual way results are displayed in columns that can be rearranged and redesigned. One feature allows users to highlight a group of links on any Web page and store them in a pull-down menu accessible from the toolbar. A9 users must download a toolbar to store and manage their Web surfing and searching history.

To alleviate privacy concerns, A9 executives said they will offer a version of the service that performs anonymous searches, and users can turn off the history and personalization features, remove information from an individual history list, and even entirely clear the history results stored on the A9 server. A9 says it will not share stored data with outside parties except Amazon.com.

Another service, Clusty, a free, consumer search service from Vivisimo, more directly competes with Google. Based on results from Yahoo's Overture engine, Clusty.com clusters results into categories to make them easier to sort through and presents a series of tabs enabling users to see results from sources other than the general Web, including shopping information, yellow pages, news, blogs, and images. According to experts, clustering reduces the confusion created when search engines return huge lists and helps users find related material that may be overlooked when they employ services, such as Google's, that use page-ranking methods. Google also uses more limited clustering technology--its news page provides links to topics that appear on news sites.