I’ve been using A9 as my default search engine for more than a year now and I’ve been perfectly happy with the results. (Yes, I started using it because installing the toolbar gets me a small percentage off my Amazon.com purchases, but I’ve kept it because the results are good and it’s flexible, letting me get results from the Web, flickr, and Wikipedia all at once.) This morning I noticed that it’s no longer pulling results from the Google database, it’s now pulling it’s results from Windows Live which is still in beta. (But then again, what isn’t these days?) I don’t know how this will effect results but I’m going to keep an eye on it to see if there’s any noticable differences.
UPDATE (later the same day): It turns out that not everyone has been switched to Windows Live. One of my co-workers still has Google as the default.
Michael Sauers is currently the Director of Technology for Do Space in Omaha, NE. Michael has been training librarians in technology for the past twenty years and has also been a public library trustee, a bookstore manager for a library friends group, a reference librarian, serials cataloger, technology consultant, and bookseller since earning his MLS in 1995 from the University at Albany’s School of Information Science and Policy. Michael has also written dozens of articles for various journals and magazines and his fourteenth book, Emerging Technologies: A Primer for Librarians (w/ Jennifer Koerber) was published in May 2015 and more books are on the way. In his spare time he blogs at travelinlibrarian.info, runs The Collector’s Guide to Dean Koontz Web site, takes many, many photos, and typically reads more than 100 books a year.
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