Also to add on this, A9 is their subsidiary that implements search engine functionality and data analytics at Amazon. "Amazon.com" is a 9 lettered word, not including the dot; "algorithms" is also a 9 lettered word.

Udi Manber, the guy who invented agrep, has worked at Yahoo, Amazon, and now Google/YouTube (as a search engine engineer at all these places), and also wrote "Introduction to Algorithms", and co-invented suffix arrays with Gene Myers, was A9's first CEO.

A former AltaVista executive and founder of A9, William Stasior, was the second CEO of A9, where he then wandered off to Apple as Vice President of Siri.

Brian Pinkerton is now the General Manager of A9, and he is famous for starting one of the first search engines, WebCrawler, before AOL bought it, sold it to Excite, which then Blucora bought all those assets along with Dogpile. Blucora also owns TaxACT, Monoprice, and HowStuffWorks.

A9 is currently located in the building that SurveyMonkey used to occupy, across from the Palo Alto Transit Center.

So, yeah, the silicon valley culture is very weirdly interconnected.