Amazon’s A9 drops support for bookmarks and diary. Adds new search design.

Amazon has developed a new strategy for its A9 search site.

The company has clearly abandoned the plans of turning A9 into a personal portal for searchers. Functions such as personal search history, diary and bookmarks have been abandoned.

The toolbar is also dead, and there is no longer an Amazon discount for A9 toolbar users.

However, the company must still have some faith in the search site concept. The new design introduces six groups of search tools.

You choose one of them by clicking on a button. This brings up a menu where you can tick off the search engines you want A9 to use in its search. Some are ticked off by default.

The six groups are:

• quick start (including web search by Microsoft’s Windows Live Search, books by Amazon, Wikipedia and more)
• entertainment including the International Movie Database and Videos.
• reference, including answers.com, wikipedia, blog search and more.
• news, including news from Live.com, Ney York times etc.
• Amazon.com, where you can select among types of goods.
• images, where you may include Flickr, Webshots, istockphoto and other sites.

You may also add other groups, including shopping, jobs, books, health and more. And, finally, you can create your own custom group based on more than 400 search sources.

A9 will present the results from the different search engines selected in separate columns, not mixed as one might expect.

This is not in any way a revolutionary innovation, but it is a system that works.

A9 has also introduced a new continuous scrolling feature, “so you no longer have to bother with next and previous buttons to move from one page of results to the next.”

What happens is that when you reach the end of the search engine result list, A9 will automatically generate new results and add them to the column. In other words: You stay on the same web page.

You may also switch to a new search group from the search engine result page.

As for the unlucky ones who have been using A9’s personalized features, there is hope:

“If you had any bookmarks or diary entries, we have saved them in files for you that you can access in the Product Extras section of your Amazon Media Library,” A9 says.