The venerable folks at VirtualChase.com have pointed to an article at infotoday.com that discusses new search features and data sources that are now available through Amazon.com's search engine, A9.com:

Amazon’s New OpenSearch Enables Search Syndication

by Richard W. Wiggins

March 28, 2005 — This month Amazon introduced a new service called OpenSearch, which allows a content provider to syndicate the ability to search the provider’s site. Announcing the new service at the O’Reilly Emerging Technology conference, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos proclaimed the OpenSearch mantra: “We want OpenSearch to do for search what RSS has done for content.”

The A9 OpenSearch page is essentially a "clearinghouse" for open data sources (other websites, rss feeds, etc.) and offers creates a portal of sorts that enables to researchers to take advantage of the source site's own search engine functions, rather than relying on the sometimes blunt instrument of the A9 global search engine for a site specific search. The infotoday.com article describes the process thusly:

"As you select each content provider, A9 sends a query to the corresponding content provider’s search engine in real time. Subsequent A9 searches will search all the content providers you’ve selected and present results in the columnar display. If the content provider’s search engine is unreachable or unresponsive, the corresponding column will show an error message."

For example,

"...Bezos demonstrated searching for “Vioxx” in a conventional search engine. Most of the results in a linear hit list will present the most popular Web pages containing that term. But if you use Amazon’s A9 as your search engine, you can select PubMed as one of your trusted “columns.” Then search A9 for Vioxx and you’ll see scientific and clinical results from PubMed in addition to the traditional Web results."

The rest of the article is well worth a read to understand the mechanisms behind the new "OpenSearch" features. It also provides a good primer if you are not familiar with A9's particular interface which allows for custom column-organized search results as well as the ability to save and revisit past searches. A pretty nifty tool all around. For those of you used to the Macintosh interace (and for the rest of you...what are you waiting for?), you might find the A9 experience similar to the finder tool's lay-out of nested indices and file structures.

Currently, the list of interesting sources that have added their content to the OpenSearch page includes: wikipedia.com, The New York Times, Pub Med, the National Institute of Standards & Technology database, the Indeed.com jobsearch, the Consumer Product Safety Commision recall database, CSPAN, and the Yellow Pages.

Many more sources of interest are sure to follow making this a must-visit page for researchers.

-- MDT

Labels: database