A9 OpenSearch

via SearchBlog

Last night at Etech Udi Manber gave me a sneak peek at what Bezos announced this morning - A9's "OpenSearch." A9 has always been more of a "remixable" search engine - with many columns on the right hand side that let you hack your search interface - you can create columns of image, reference, web, and many other types of searches. When I wrote up A9 last year, I imagined that those buttons on the right hand side may well augur a time when any content provider might become a button. Turns out, I was right. But I didn't imagine A9 would use RSS as the way to do it, it's a neat hack. As the tagline to the introduction of the new services states: "We want OpenSearch to do for search what RSS has done for content."