We Put Technology to Work in the Real World.
Product Search
A9 powers Product Search for Amazon sites around the world. If you've done a search on Amazon, you've used the
A9 Product Search engine.
Our work starts long before a customer types a query. We've been analyzing data, observing past traffic patterns, and indexing the text describing every product in our catalog before the customer has even decided to search. And as soon as we see the first keystroke, we're ready with instant suggestions and a comprehensive set of search results.
Visual Search
Large-scale computer vision solutions that help people discover more about the world around them.
"Our goal is to create solutions that are so simple to use, so fast and convenient, that customers prefer them to traditional search methods." -Sunil R., Visual Search
Augmented Reality: Using a camera-phone as the view of the world
Our technology helps customers use visual information for search, discovery and shopping. We create Augmented Reality solutions on mobile devices, overlaying relevant information over camera-phone views of the world around us.
It is often easier to search with a picture than it is to type. We build technologies to recognize objects in camera-phone views. We also support barcode and QR code recognition on mobile devices.
A9 Visual Search also powers solutions that lets customers search for products based on their visual attributes such as color, shape or even texture. Such solutions appear on Amazon.com and Zappos.com, allowing customers to quickly find the shoes or watches they like based on the appearance of the product.
Cloud Search
We adapted A9's technology for the Cloud; now anyone can implement the same powerful search on their own site.
"CloudSearch frees people from having to become search experts. Our service does the heavy lifting so our customers can focus on running their business." - Puneet G., CloudSearch
How It Works
Developed by A9, Amazon CloudSearch Is based on the same technology that powers search on Amazon.com.
CloudSearch is the fully-managed, cloud-based search service for Amazon Web Services (AWS). It allows businesses and developers to easily integrate fast and highly scalable search functionality into their applications.
Developers don't have to worry about hardware provisioning, data partitioning, or software patches. They simply create a search instance -- called a search domain in CloudSearch -- and upload the data they want to make searchable. The service then automatically allocates the servers required and deploys a highly tuned search index. CloudSearch relies on many proven AWS services, such as EC2 and EMR.
Mobile Apps
Mobile and Ubiquitous
The Mobile Applications team develops apps that help customers shop and search using visual search technology.
We use Visual Search technology to create customer-centric applications that help people discover more about the world around them using a camera phone view. We rely on robust systems infrastructure, and integrate multiple mobile-device signals, such as orientation, location and gestures, into our apps.
Our apps aim to create a magical customer-experience. Designers, Engineers, Product Managers collaborate to incorporate cutting edge vision technology and intuitive UXs with media-rich experiences that are lightning fast, and effortless to use.
Advertising
Building ad serving and optimization systems that handle billions of queries every day.
We focus on the customer. We take a long-term view. We think big.
Serving Our Customers
Advertising is one of the ways Amazon is able to offer lower prices to our customers.
As an integral part of Amazon's advertising efforts, A9's Ad Tech team builds the technology infrastructure and ad serving systems to manage unprecedented traffic. The result is better quality advertising for publishers and better, more relevant ads for customers.
Technical Operations
Amazon relies on our global Tech Ops team to run a world-class Search infrastructure
Infrastructure That Scales.
Search and several related services we support are at the core of the Amazon business: they help customers find the items they want to buy. We are always online and ready to respond.
Our globally distributed team oversees the smooth-running of all search system operations on Amazon sites in North America, Europe and Asia; our Client Services group provides hands on support for those that depend on A9's search systems.
Besides our ultra-high availability frontline operations, we plan and scale with the fast-paced growth of search. We look at the data; we determine what services are needed; we implement solutions and we manage deployments. We are responsible for thousands of servers handling 100s of millions customer searches daily.
We stay agile so that we can adapt to unexpected change and exponential growth. We are ready when peak traffic surges, and we understand that yesterday's record is going to be tomorrow's average, so we always stay ahead with our infrastructure.
