San Francisco, Sept 26: Amazon.com Inc. is invading Google's turf with a new online search engine company that hopes to pluck some of the profits flowing into the rapidly growing sector. Seattle-based Amazon has dubbed its search startup "A9" and set up offices in Palo Alto, California, not far from Google's Mountain View headquarters. A9 hopes to launch in October with 30 employees and grow much larger as it develops a search engine that will be licensed to other web sites, said spokeswoman Alison Diboll. "This is part of Amazon's ongoing evolution from an online bookstore to a technology services company," Diboll said. Unlike Google, A9 isn't trying to develop an all-purpose search engine that indexes billions of web pages. The startup instead is zeroing on a one of search engines' sweet spots -- e-commerce.
As more consumers have become comfortable with the internet, a growing number are using search engines to review products and compare prices. The research frequently results in online sales, prompting more advertisers to pay for prominent listings in the commercial sections of Google and other search engines.
Privately held Google won't provide details about its finances, but the company is believed to be profitable, with revenues this year expected to range from USD700 million to USD1 billion. Bureau Report