March 15th, 2005
Bezos: A9 syndicates search
At the O’Reilly Emerging Technology Conference today, Amazon founder and CEO Jeff Bezos introduced A9’s OpenSearch, which he hopes will to do for search what RSS has done for content. OpenSearch lets users add searchable columns to the A9 search application and syndicate them via a few extensions to RSS.
In this interview, which is available as both an MP3 download and as podcast that you can have downloaded to your system and/or MP3 player automatically (see ZDNet’s podcasts: How to tune in), I talked to Bezos and Udi Mander, A9 president and Amazon’s search guru, about OpenSearch and the progress the tech industry has made in making search more useful.
Search blogger John Battelle comments in his blog: This is a neat idea, one that I think will evolve and shift over time. What helped me grok it was the idea of a professional, say a doctor, who builds his or her own A9 interface that has traditional web search, as well as a special column for PubMed (MedLine). It lets the doctor remix the search experience to add vertical search results as well as web search into his search interface.
Bonus: Yahoo! Research Labs and O’Reilly Media jointly developed Tech Buzz Game, an online prediction market that lets users forecast the popularity of tech trends, concepts and products.
Dan Farber, editor-in-chief of CNET News.com, has more than 20 years of experience as an editor and journalist covering technology. See his full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations.
