No more logging on to use popular e-commerce site. SEATTLE — Amazon.com Inc.'s A9 search engine has dropped some of its most widely touted features, including the ability to remember everything a user has ever searched for and a service that showed detailed, street-level images of major cities.

Article: http://us.rd.yahoo.com/dailynews/rss/searc...cxsvc=7&cxcat=3

Barely related at all. Basically none. Just says amazon could seach wikipedia.

Why on earth would anyone expect Amazon to offer a service that showed detailed, street-level images of major cities? That's the job of sites like multimap and streetmap, not a bookshop.

Presumably the map specialty sites just don't have enough money to handle something like that - I can imagine it involves a ton of driving around, wearing out digital cameras, indexing images by address, that sort of thing.

Or, Amazon might have been doing it to get photos of any book and record shops that still exist before they drive them all out of business, just so they'll have something more tangible to gloat over than the usual pie charts.