Amazon and Google

Word has just gotten out in the blogosphere about Amazon.com's A9 search engine. This, and my recent rediscovery of Alexa has got me thinking a lot about the similarities and differences between Amazon.com and Google and also synergies both inter-company and intra-company.

Random Thoughts:

• The A9 toolbar has a "diary" feature for making notes about pages. Is this the beginning of Amazon.com's blogging story?
• Will GMail somehow be tied to Orkut at some stage?
• What if Amazon.com expanded Amazon Friends to be a full-blown social network?
• Why doesn't Amazon.com do a music version of IMDb?

Amazon and Google are two of my favourite companies. It will be fascinating to see what happens over the next few years.

UPDATE (2004/04/16): Found (via Scoble) an interesting Amazon what-if: Amazoning the News.