Amazon.com CEO Jeff Bezos announced this morning the release of a new feature for A9.com that promises to “do for search what RSS has done for content.” It’s called “OpenSearch” and it’s a collection of technologies built on top of popular open standards that allows content providers to publish search results ready for syndication. Read [...]
Amazon.com CEO Jeff Bezos announced this morning the release of a new feature for A9.com that promises to “do for search what RSS has done for content.”
It’s called “OpenSearch” and it’s a collection of technologies built on top of popular open standards that allows content providers to publish search results ready for syndication. Read more from Amazon here.
Amazon wants you to know it’s “not a search engine”, but rather an extension of RSS 2.0, consisting of:
- OpenSearch RSS: XML format for providing open search results.
- OpenSearch Description Documents: XML files that identify and describe a search engine.
- OpenSearch Aggregators: Sites, such as A9.com, that can display OpenSearch results.
John Battelle has the inside track. (BTW, we swear we’re not all walking around with “I Heart Battelle” t-shirts, though you’d probably think so from our posts today).
Whether or not it revolutionizes search the way RSS has done for content remains to be seen (becoming a little less wonky to use would be a good start), though we will say this is important in that any developer can create and distribute a searchable column that can be added to A9. In other words, if you’ve got a content site, you can syndicate searches of that content in a way that’s very easy to do.
On the other end, users can add more columns to their search set to drill down to very specific search parameters. Battelle and others are looking at this as a part of vertical search, and A9 is riding the wave of innovation.
