NEW YORK (CNN/Money) - It's only April, but I think I can start writing the headlines for some of my end-of-2004 stories.

Here's one: "2004: Search's Year of Change."

Maybe I'm getting a little ahead of myself, but already this year we've seen tremendous changes in the world of search. First, thanks in large part to keyword advertising, search has become respectable again. And second, huge players are entering what was considered a crowded market.

Just last week, one of the big players unveiled a search offering: Amazon.com took the wraps off its wholly-owned subsidiary A9.com. (The second huge player, Microsoft, is expected to unveil its search engine later this year.) The site is currently in beta mode, with no word as to when it will become official, but the industry is abuzz about what this means.

John Battelle, the Business 2.0 columnist who broke the story, is of the mind that A9 is a huge step forward and seriously alters the search landscape. After spending a lot of time on the site, speaking with an A9 spokesperson, and consulting analysts and privacy watchdogs, I'm not convinced. I don't think investors should expect much, if anything, from this Amazon play, at least not in the foreseeable future.

Don't get me wrong -- A9 has some pretty cool features. My favorite among them is the "Site Info" box that displays stats about each site listed in your search results -- a page's traffic rank, the number of sites that link to it, its estimated load time, and similar sites. That's very cool.

I could also see the "diary" feature having some value if you were doing Web research. And I like how the site arranges Google-served Web search results on the left, e-commerce-related results (currently limited to Amazon books) in the middle, and, if you're a member of Amazon, your search history on the right.

The revenue plan for the site is two-pronged. First, A9 will collect cash from the Google-provided AdWords that appear in the left-hand column. Second, and probably where Amazon (AMZN: Research, Estimates) has the biggest hopes for the service, the site may offer its e-commerce search capabilities to third parties.

Alison Diboll, a spokeswoman for A9, says the site's goal is to "develop advanced e-commerce technology for Amazon and other sites." And that's where the service could get interesting -- when A9 offers more e-commerce capabilities than simply searching books, and can sell that interface and technology to third parties, many of whom currently rely on Google enterprise servers for those kinds of searches.

But that future is predicated on a couple of factors that I'm not sure will align in A9's favor. For one thing, A9 is trying to reverse the current trend of search sites adding e-commerce components. The marketplace has responded favorably when companies such as Yahoo (YHOO: Research, Estimates) and Google have done this, and for good reason: Allowing consumers to search products is a natural extension of these sites' core offerings.

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I'm not certain the reverse -- an e-commerce company adding search -- will work. It may be a semantic concern -- a search company offering e-commerce vs. an e-commerce company offering search -- but it's a concern nonetheless, and it's rooted in consumer perception.

More pressing, however, are the privacy uproars that have already sounded over A9. If you're a signed-in member of Amazon and you download the A9 toolbar (similar to the myriad toolbars already available from Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, et al.), here's the information the site can possess: a history of every Web site visited, every search performed, and every product purchased -- all tied to your name, credit card number, and address, courtesy of your Amazon account.

"No one who puts any value in their privacy should touch this service," says Kevin Bankston, an attorney with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, an online privacy and rights organization. "A9 is a very bad step for privacy, and [all the information stored is] a very attractive target for government or civil litigants."

In response, A9's Diboll points to the generic.a9.com offering, which disables much of the tracking, and also highlights the service's privacy policy, which states that user information will not be given to third parties. But if A9 starts selling its search and e-commerce package to other companies, wouldn't the user data reside on those companies' servers and not be subject to A9's privacy policy? Diboll won't speculate on future developments for the service.

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A9 will need to navigate these privacy concerns with care and caution. It's not a good sign that, according to Bankston, A9 didn't meet with EFF before launching.

Google largely has botched its response to the Gmail privacy concerns, initially expressing incredulity that people would even think it would do anything untoward with their information. To its credit, Amazon has a good track record of honoring people's privacy. It's one of the few sites to which I have given my actual e-mail address in registering (rather than my spam-dumpster Hotmail account), and in the six years I've been a customer, I've never felt infringed.

But the fact remains that I don't need to save my one- and two-word searches, I'm able to find stuff on the Web through Google, and I can visit individual e-commerce sites when I'm looking for products. Other than possibly for corporate customers, I'm not sure the market needs A9.

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