What a bit of competition can accomplish. Definitely an outsider in the Search Engine Battle, A9.com (owned by Amazon.com) continues to do innovative things. They’ve recently launched this crazy new feature called block view. It’s a basic local search, based on the yellow page listings, including search results on a map, but they’ve combined it with photos of the storefront of businesses. And then it let’s you ‘walk’ down the block.

I’m wondering if this is brilliant or one of those, “let’s do it because we can”. Either way, the way they do it is very slick. And how on earth are they planning to keep the pictures up to date? Businesses come and go. We’ll find out.

A better application in my mind would be do drive down all freeways and take pictures of the exits and put them in a driving directions application.