A9.com with Syndicated Search

joeykiller writes "Search Engine Watch reports that Amazon now lets you add your own search to their A9 search engine. Users can opt-in to use additional search engines in addition to A9.com's own when searching. Amazon has chosen to use an extension of RSS 2.0 for this, and hopes that this format will enable search syndication in the same way RSS did for content. Several add-on searches are available already, among them New York Times, Wikipedia and NASA."

Comments

Google ?

[mirko]

I can't wait until Google does the same caus' I'd like to use this featrue to evaluate some of my client's sites popularity, day after day.

Re:Have it your way

[PepeGSay]

I've been using A9 as my primary search since it launched and I have to say this new feature is very cool. When a search doesn't find hits like I like, I can go to WikiPedia and even blog searches to find out if someone else has mentioned the topic. When you are looking for clusters of keywords on a topic you are only beginning to research it is very powerful.

Interesting Move

[filmmaker]

This is an interesting move by Amazon, and it's certainly an improvement over delivering static HTML pages from a database, an increasingly worthless exercise.

However, why do they need to extend RSS? I fail to see what the extensions are for, when all they really need is a XSL transformed RSS document or perhaps an XSL transformed XHTML document with an accompanying or alternative URL to fetch RSS directly.

Anyway, I like this because hopefully the next move is for the big three to start offering straight XML results; this in addition to or in leiu of the data APIs Google and Yahoo already make available to web authors.

Thing is, if they just published search results in RSS, then non programmers could jump in the game and start utilizing the data for different applications. It would open up the field considerably, but unfortunately, it would mean a lot more abuse too from search spammers would would seek to capitalize on the data.