Just seen tehe following:
Search Briefs: So Long to A9's Block Level Imagery, Yellow Pages, Toolbar and
Amazon.com Discount; Yahoo to Open Yahoo Mail API
http://www.resourceshelf.com/2006/10/01/search-briefs-a9-discontinues-many-features-yahoo-to-open-yahoo-mail-api/
Their toolbar is probably b0rked (I have noticed oddities for a few
weeks/months), registration/signin has been dodgy for a while, thumbnails
are no longer delivered (not even as a service to, e.g. BetterSearch in
Firefox), and Alexa rank pages are gone, only to be replaced by some
adverts. I don't know about the Amazon/Alexa toolbars, but they could be
headed down the same path. I am only speculating this.
FWIW, A9 dropped Google as its search engine and probably accepted $ome deal
for Microsoft to use Live/MSN instead. That was only a few months ago. This
was probably the end of it serving as a neat search engine with simultaneous
image, Web, and video search. It certainty lost its quality results and
uniqueness.
I wonder if others have noticed something similar. I have disabled my
toolbars for the time being as it looks grimmer than suggested. Well,
there's always Netcraft.
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