Saturday, April 29th, 2006, 8:31 am
A9/Alexa Sidle Close to Microsoft Live
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A9 is a fairly bloated search engine that I mentioned at least a couple of times in the past. It just struck me in the newsgroups that A9 had shifted to search results from Microsoft. For quite some time they used to be happily harvesting purely from Google, but at present, with MSN/Live.com, the results are definitely poorer, as most would expect. As a matter of fact, as an important nugget of information, Microsoft’s share among search engines sank from 14% to just 11% in the last quarter alone.
Why would A9 ever consider a change? One possibility among many is that A9′s incentive was financially motivated. Microsoft have just thrown vast amounts of money, most probably in the war against Google who promote Open Source software in their search engine results. The come to consider their highly successful use of GNU/Linux, let alone their sponsorships of Open Source projects (one example among many).
Microsoft have recently begun using the same strategy to elbow IBM, who in turn migrate businesses away from Microsoft.
