Me and Rohit need your help.

Here my 2 cents.

While Google concentrates on simplicity and delivering the most relevant search results in the shortest possible time, A9 is adding the experience face to the process of conducting a web search by providing various facets like related movies and books.

But you must remember A9 still relies on the google to do it's searching for it. There no actual difference in the search results. Therefore the adding functionality is rendered useless because it is not doing anything new. I could search books, movies, wikipedia using my firefox search toolbar so in the end that A9 functionality is nuetralised for me.

The new buzz word is customizable search engines - if you want a peak at that give Rokkyo.com a look. Which allows you to narrow down you're search to a speciffic number of sites.

If Answer.com to be is to be believed the future of search is not in supplying links to the user but actually supplying them with the answer to the querry by themselves.

An excellent point by Akshay. With A9, everytime I have to build a query I also have to tell it where to look. Too much work for me when I can use my Firefox toolbar to get there in an instant. On the other hand, the Google Desktop Search already has the context built into it and shows me the most relevent results, on my desktop or on the Internet, ranked. I also don't have to customize my search index more than once.

Another trend I am betting on is towards Iterative search, users can start out with minimum input but provide the best results after a few steps that narrow it down. In fact, I am hoping that the next line of search technology won't even allow surfers to be aware of the need to provide iterative input.

Hey Sid! Haven't talked to you in forever and a day...hope all is well with you!

What I thought was cool on a9 was when I searched diseases (I'm such a microbiology nerd), instead of listing the sponsored links first, it had a list of "Most Recent Updates on _____[Insert Disease Here]." It also had the little bubble pop up that listed the traffic, and its date of creation. Which is awesome--to consider that the date of certain articles is relevant--especially when it comes to diseases and epidemiology. Actually, now that I say that, it's relevant for any kind of science, since progress is uprooting old theories and laws day and night.

Anyway, I'd still use Google because I'm used to it--I'm such a typical American, stuck in my old ways. But if I want to research diseases in particular, I may skip over to a9.

Sorry I didn't have anything technical to contribute to that! My knowledge about computers is at a bovine level, I assure you, so anything I'd try to say would make no sense.