File this under "H" for "holy shit that's cool." Amazon's in-house search engine, A9.com just released a yellow-pages like local search engine which includes photos of all the listed businesses. How did they get the photos? They drove a van around every street in several major cities taking hundreds of pictures along the way. I now have severe job envy.

Although the search results seem a little off geographically, the overall effect is amazing. Here's every Starbucks in downtown New York -- or wherever you happen to live. Since A9 sits on top of Amazon's unmatched database of personal user information, the search is automatically tailored to your location. As I mentioned in an earlier post about A9, they've got a unique advantage over Google, Yahoo, and other search providers since they already own the user database and can personalize without the added privacy burden. Long term, my guess is that A9 will be a huge monetization engine within Amazon, but not a big play as a stand alone search engine. Prediction: Amazon will launch a local keyword bidding tool in 2005 and syndicate the program to their associates as well.