a9 Reward Program Gone – a9 now using live.com

Earlier today, A9 (owned by Amazon) posted a note on the a9.com site that reads:

A New Look and Focus for the A9.com Website
We redesigned the A9.com website to make it easier and quicker to discover information from more sources. The left hand column of the page has some groups of search sources that you can select from. Within each group, you can choose to display or hide specific search columns. You can quickly switch among groups, and you can also quickly add additional groups that we have built. You can also add any OpenSearch™ search source to any group, and move sources among groups by dragging and dropping them.

To make it easier to navigate your results, we have introduced a new continuous scrolling feature, so you no longer have to bother with next and previous buttons to move from one page of results to the next. You can now also drag-and-drop the columns to change their order on the page.

We have discontinued the A9 Instant Reward program, and the A9 Toolbar and personalized services such as history, bookmarks, and diary. To get help uninstalling your A9 Toolbar, visit toolbar.a9.com. We have also discontinued A9 Maps and the A9 Yellow Pages (including BlockView™).

Access to Bookmarks and Diary: If you had any bookmarks or diary entries, we have saved them in files for you that you can access in the Product Extras section of your Amazon Media Library. To download the file, click download in the right-hand column (if you don't see download, select list view). There are up to three files located: one with both bookmarks and diary entries in a searchable, printable form; one with bookmarks in a format easy to import to other browsers; and one with diary entries in a text/xml format.

There are two big items of note in this release:

• No more Instant Reward program – I am sure on Fatwallet people are jumping out windows. I never really saw a big benefit for this program as every time I tried using a9 for search, I never got a credit on Amazon purchases.
• Search is now powered by Windows Live – This should certainly help Windows Live usage go up but how much is the question. Also, will a9 be able to survive in the long run when people using their tools are now going to go elsewhere and can easily pick up search from there.

So my question is for those who used a9's discount on Amazon: Will you continue to buy from Amazon even though this sweet discount is gone?

Looks like Amazon has a link to update:

http://www.amazon.com/gp/xs/sharethepi.html

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