Amazon’s search startup, A9.com, has launched a new service called Open Search and it may shake things up a bit. Read on to see how this new open standards search offering works and how it might impact the industry. A9 is a late-comer to the search engine wars and has always had its work cut out, trying to find a distinction with a difference. Search results come from Google and supplemented by information form theAmazon.com database, the Internet Movie Database and GuruNet. Considering that the results generated by querying A9 are all drawn from other sources, A9 has always been forced to differentiate itself with its feature set. The default implementation of the A9 search tool includes a search history, where it keeps you previous searches and organizes for you chronologically. You can also take notes on sites and search result sets and the system will store them for you. From a research perspective these are good and useful tools, but the simple fact is that most people won’t find these basic tools reason enough to abandon their search engines of choice. With the addition of Open Search, A9 has solved two of their biggest problems in one fell swoop: How to get more search results and how to create a tool that is truly unique and useful. What is Open Search? A9 gives us this explanation: “a collection of technologies, all built on top of popular open standards, to allow content providers to publish their search results in a […]
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