Amazon-owned A9.com has opened up its OpenSearch technology for all users who currently have a search box already on their websites. OpenSearch is a new XML-based technology that lets users syndicate their website’s search results. On the A9 website, a visitor can search for products or information and once the results are returned, they can do another search inside each website while staying upon the A9 site.
The advantage of this kind of search is that deeper searches can be made into each website. According to A9, “The web is a big place. And search engines that crawl the surface of the web are only picking up a small fraction of the great content that is out there. But more than that—the richest content can’t be adequately indexed by one engine alone. Different types of content require different types of search engines. And most of the time, the best search engines for a site are the ones written by those that know the content the best. Unfortunately, that often means that users need to know where that site is and how to find, and use, the search engine once they are there. By supporting OpenSearch, that search engine can be exposed to the world and the results made available everywhere. Even small, specialized websites can now have the same visibility and distribution as the major search engines.”
Some of the websites that have jumped onboard of this new technology include the New York Times, NASA, Wikipedia and Flickr. By clicking the “Try It” button next to any of these websites results listing, A9 will display an additional search box for searching the internal contents of each of these websites. By clicking on any of these new results, a new window is opened up that links directly to that website.
One of my favorite features of the A9.com search is that when you do a search not only are the web results displayed along the left side, but in the middle of the page are the image search results as well. When trying out a new search engine, I like to search for the keyword phrase “funny t-shirts” as a test. With A9, results similar to other search engines are returned under “Web Results” but a whole row of images of funny t-shirts is also returned, which, in my opinion, greatly adds to the relevance of the search. There is even a new feature on the right side for adding and deleting columns so that you can display instead of (or in addition to) images, books, movies, reference, yellow pages, Your History, Your Bookmarks or Your Diary results as well.
When hovering the cursor above the “Site Info” button on the search results, a box appears with information on traffic rank, links, loading speed and age of the website. The downside is when clicking the “Site Info” button, the A9 site jumps to Amazon.com in order to display much of this same information and suddenly you find yourself surrounded by all sorts of Amazon advertising, which in my opinion, is irrelevant to my search.
All in all, though, A9.com is worth checking out. It adds a whole new dimension to search not covered by the Big 3 search engines with its website search features and multi-search capabilities. A9 ranks a 10 in my book.
