So, we’re all preoccupied with how Google wants to store and index all your life’s email for you; now Amazon wants to store and index your search history for you, for better or worse. A beta of the new A9.com search portal went live yesterday. Some of its more interesting features, if you use your amazon.com log-in and accept cookies:

• Each entry in the results page of your search includes a notation of the date and time you last clicked on that link.
• There’s a tab to simultaneously show you the results of the same query performed on Amazon’s book database.
• Most Google search syntax works.
• If you rerun a search you have previously done, the results page tells you which hits are new.

If you want to search in privacy, you can use generic.a9.com instead, which promises not to recognize a9 or amazon cookies. John Battelle discusses some of the implications of the ‘history server ‘ concept here.