Amazon adds photographs to local search
Online retail giant Amazon.com has launched a new local business directory that supplements address and phone number listings with a photographic tour covering 10 major US cities, including Dallas New York, Los Angeles, Chicago and Boston.
The free service, available from Amazon search subsidiary A9.com, consists of 20 million street-level photographs that will be displayed alongside local search results.
Users who click on a Yellow Pages tab and search for Mexican restaurants, for example, will see street-level pictures of building exteriors in addition to the standard listing information found in other directories.
The index was reportedly compiled by covering tens of thousands of miles in trucks equipped with digital cameras and global positioning system receivers.
Barnaby Dorfman, Amazon's director of programming, said: "The printed yellow pages have been around for 100 years, and they haven't changed much. This is a way of taking it to the next level."
Udi Mander, chief executive of A9 and a pioneer in search technology, said the feature would give people information about a business that had not been available online, like the availability of parking and a sense of the neighbourhood.
Seattle-based Amazon is increasingly trying to make its presence known in the lucrative search market. With the new service, the online bookseller joins Yahoo, Google and many other companies in offering the electronic equivalent of a Yellow Pages directory. The other cities covered by the photographic service are, San Francisco, Atlanta, Denver, Seattle and Portland, Oregon.
28 January 2005
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