A9.com OpenSearch

Remember a few posts back, when I talked about A9.com? Well, they just added a new feature called OpenSearch.

Now, I have to confess that I don't totally get it yet, or maybe it's not quite working right or something. But, A9.com comes with a few different search places. So, it searches the web using Google, Amazon.com for books, and so-on. Each of these searches can be in it's own column, and you can choose which of these columns you want to look at.

OpenSearch provides a way to add more search sources. Like Wikipedia, various news sources, etc. There is a whole list on the web site. They also have a mechanism where authors of web sites can create these kinds of searches and add your own column. They extended the RSS 2.0 specification a little bit, which is one of the formats used for blogging to an XML file.

I know this all sounds kind of techy, and it is. But, if you haven't played with A9.com yet, you might want to try it out now, and see what you think!