Update: 2005-05-24
Seems that A9/Amazon has switched from Google to Microsoft search for their back end, so this feature no longer works, since they haven’t integrated Microsoft’s image search yet. However, you can add Flickr search results which — as noted below — works pretty well.

One reason why I use Amazon’s A9 search service is the ability to search websites side-by-side with images. Why is this useful?

To take an esoteric example, this morning I was looking for an image of the GEOS satellite-derived winds for the west coast of North America. This type of search is perfect for A9’s side-by-side feature. Entering in GOES HIGH DENSITY WINDS on A9, the following page is returned.

For me, it’s much easier just to scan down the image thumbnails on the right for the type of image I was looking for versus reading through the website links. In a couple of clicks I was able to find this page which is exactly what I wanted.

Of course, you could do this type of search using Google image search or Yahoo! image search, but I find that it’s handy to have both the website search and image search features side-by-side. The website links can be used as a fall back just in case you can’t find an image that matches.

I’d have to say that Yahoo! probably is in the best position to capitalize on this functionality, since they own Flickr. Flickr is obviously not so good at helping you find websites, but if you are interested in images of… bougainvillea, for example… they rock.

Zoinger says, search isn’t just about text.