When you're searching Amazon.com, Inc. (NASDAQ:AMZN) for a product or for loads of products, are you in tune with the shipping situation? Most customers are. In fact, Amazon's "Prime" program, which has seen decent success, is built around one single premise -- getting the consumer to subscribe to an annual fee for free shipping on most items.

While products sold directly and shipped directly by Amazon.com are included in this program, products sold by third-party companies using Amazon's website are not. Is it hard to differentiate between the two? It is to some, and Amazon's search engine not doing the best job of separating those two buckets isn't helping either.

Well, instead of Amazon getting around to fix this problem for customers, a third party has fixed it for the online retailer. At iSearchBetter.com, product searches are segregated into specifics so a customer can determine which overall cheaper price -- with and without the "Prime" discount -- is available, both from Amazon itself and from third-party sellers also pitching the same product at Amazon's website.

For large shoppers of Amazon.com, it's nice to see that a solution like this exists -- although it would have been better for Amazon to re-engineer parts of its search platform to accommodate the various shipping programs it has available.

Amazon looks to be the first major web player to ditch Google as its primary search partner.  There is no official news yet but netizens are beginning to report that their A9 searches and Alexa searches are returning Windows Live (MSN search) results.

This comes on the tail of many web retailers taking a defensive stance to Google's release of Google Base, which lets retailers circumvent eBay and Amazon as aggregators and sell directly to the consumer.

This apparent small victory for Microsoft highlights the coming battle between Microsoft, Yahoo, and Google for search (search-revenue) supremacy.

This appears to be a win for Microsoft, a questionable move by Amazon, and a loss for Google.  When news becomes 'official' how will the markets react?