A9.com, Inc. researches and builds innovative technologies to improve search experience for e-commerce applications. A separately branded and operated subsidiary of Amazon.com Inc., A9.com opened its Palo Alto, California, doors in October 2003 and Bangalore office in August 2004. A9.com's technology powers search on Amazon.com and other web sites.

The A9 India team is primarily geared towards the advertisement market. As part of A9, we run the Sponsored Links program for Amazon.com. One can register to the sponsored links program by visiting www.clickriver.com. A lot of interesting and cool technologies have been built around this that includes

• A semi-automated way (automated + manual) of understanding the category of a website
• Statistical and semantic text mining algorithms to extract the concepts of a web page for several languages (English, Japanese, German)
• Building the Dataware house for the advertiser network
• Algorithms around click patterns and detection of invalid clicks for the sponsored link market
• Prediction model of the advertisement traffic based on historic data

The team in India is a good mix of product managers, analytic/statisticians, text miners, database/warehouse gurus, systems folks who work together to solve interesting problems in the sponsored link market. Clickriver saw its Open Beta launch on Nov. 1st, 2006.