Like everyone else, I get a lot of spam.  (My recent favorite was for penile extension “trial offer!”.  I didn’t want to know what happened once the “trial” period had concluded . . .)  The other day, something from Amazon actually caught my eye:

I tend to be highly suspicious when a big company uses my personal data and presents me with an offer to supposedly help me.  I mean, companies aren’t in the business of helping their customers unless it makes them money.  And I also don’t like to install extra plug-ins.  So yeah, I was reluctant.

But heck, I review stuff for Gear Diary, so I plunged in anyway.  And here’s what I found.

The Amazon Assist Firefox plugin creates a little Amazon bar in Firefox which it places at the bottom of your Firefox window at the bottom, just above the “search in page” bar:

I know it’s hard to see.  But you have a search text entry field, which you can restrict to different departments, or just leave it set to “All Departments” (which is what I did most of the time).  You can also restrict your results to Prime vs. not-Prime, which is pretty handy if you’re trying to save on shipping.

So here’s how it works:  you go shopping on Buy.com or Target.com or some such place.  (Or in my case, Barnes and Noble, to do book price comparisons.)  Find an item.  Enter the name of that item (I typically just did a cut and paste) in the text search box and hit return.  Whammo; the search bar expands, giving you icons representing your results.  Hover over the results, and you see details on that item.

A nice feature is that you can use it on multiple tabs, and it saves the state.  In other words, if you did a search on one tab and got results, those results stay on that tab when you go to another tab and do another search.  That gets a “well done” from the software nerd in me.

Now, I don’t what information on my buying habits–if any–this new little plug-in is sucking up.  Amazon doesn’t say, but my guess is that every time you do a search in this plug-in, it grabs the same information Amazon does if you’re shopping on their site directly.  This is just a guess, though.  But to me, that’s not much of a downside; if you’ve already resigned yourself to the fact that Amazon is accumulating purchasing data on you, all this gives them is a bit more.  And if you’re a real comparison-shopping maven, it doesn’t give them any more, because you probably would have gone to Amazon to check their prices anyway.

On the flip side, what you get is a really quick, easy way to do comparison shopping.  I find that, in the book realm, where Barnes and Noble and Amazon’s library of offerings don’t match up, it makes finding (or not) a particular book at the lowest price much easier.  And with other products, you get a quick check as to whether Amazon can give you a better deal.  Which is pretty sweet most of the time, honestly.

So in sum, I have to say I recommend installing this plug-in, despite my privacy worries, and despite the real estate it takes up in my browser window.  It’s free, it’s easy to use, easy to install, and relatively unobtrusive when you’re not using it.

What I liked:  easy to use, free, helps me find bargains on Amazon
What needs improvement:  Probably records personal data; uses an entire window’s-width bar for the interface, giving you less vertical space in your Firefox window
MSRP:  free for Firefox users (currently)