A9.com, a subsidiary of Amazon, will add to its search service online a new feature that complements the results of a search to find companies or services with information on address, phone number and photographic images.
The new functionality is available for 10 of the main American cities, starting next Tuesday, and it is possible due to the photographic archive work carried out by the subsidiary that placed trucks equipped with cameras and GPS to travel through the cities in question, collecting 20 million people. street photos.
The service, which for now will be available free of charge, is activated in local searches carried out, for example, in the Yellow Pages service, available on the A9 website. In a search for Italian restaurants, for example, the user receives written location information, supplemented with a photo of the street.
This image can be manipulated, using tools available in the search engine, which allow you to go around the area surrounding a certain location. If the user wants the service, it also allows a direct telephone connection to the searched location.
The reinforcement of A9’s functionality is seen as an attempt by Amazon to gain weight in a market dominated by Google and Yahoo, where Microsoft and AOL also act with leadership intentions.
A9 was formed by Amazon in October 2003 and since then it has been offering research services discreetly and without major efforts to promote the parent company.
In December, data collected by comScore Media Metrix revealed that the site attracted 816 thousand unique visitors, placing it in the thirtieth position of the ranking search engines, a table led by Google with 71.7 million unique visits.
Later this year, Amazon plans to extend the functionality to new cities. New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Boston, San Francisco, Atlanta, Denver, Dallas, Seattle and Portland are already covered.
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