Amazon's a9 search portal made it Beta-form debut, as noted by CNET News, combining Google's web searches and contextual ads with Amazon's content ecommerce capabilities, as well as some very interesting and useful user features. Registration for personalization features is easy to do if you're an Amazon customer, as a9 borrows registration data already on file with Amazon if you're a customer. What a coup for content ecommerce: search for topics, buy related premium content with a supllier that has a dead-certain track record and the ability to provide the industry's best (though hardly perfect) "content concierge" services. User interface features include search history folders (instant personal taxonomy), a very slick vertical folder design for book results and search history, and searches accessible via Web address input (try a9.com/open access as an example). It's a simple feature set, but highly compelling as a very competent "hit the ground running" first effort. Main weakness: the inability to use all Amazon book texts as search criteria severely limits relevance of book results in comparison to typical Google results. Having the ecommerce data helps to some degree, but that plus taxonomies and metadata isn't quite enough. This is more argument for publishers to accelerate the launching of book titles "ebook first", as it will accelerate the ability of titles to be found via a9-like interfaces with an ease that will place premium content in a better position versus open Web search results. When this model includes additional payment models and does a slicker integration of premium and regular content, watch out, aggregators. The race is on...