Syndicated searching: A9 OpenSearch
OpenSearch in a way is kind of similar to what Technorati tag search has done by incorporating results from not only the Technorati index but also aggregating results from Furl, del.icio.us and Flickr.
From the website:
“OpenSearch is a collection of technologies, all built on top of popular open standards, to allow content providers to publish their search results in a format suitable for syndication.”
Many sites have a search box where you can search the sites contents and view the results page. If this search mechanism is done according to an open system then the search results of this website can be displayed on other websites, just like RSS feed content from one site can be displayed on another site.
Now any website can enable search results of their content to be syndicated elsewhere by adding OpenSearch RSS to their code.
At the moment A9 works as an OpenSearch Aggregator, in that it displays search results from various websites.
There is a running list of content providers who have made their website search results compatible with OpenSearch.
For users: if you are not registered you can only add one website to search, otherwise you can add multiple sites.
So try searching A9 web plus PubMed at the same time.
This technology is amazing, I would love to search all my favourite websites at the same time, and see the results in individual columns
I wonder if it’s possible for people to hack or scrape sites to be included in OpenSearch.
Meta-searching
- The results are returned side by side and not in one list
- The actual indexes you are searching don’t have to be general search engines, they can be individual websites…many meta-search tools search several search engines similtaneously, but not many can search several websites similtaneously (you know what I mean)
- Google can do “site:” search for websites, but this is using the Google index…you can probably do multiple site searches in the one query but the results are in one collated page.
- A9 uses the native search mechanism which can index the site far better than a general search engine index process of visits from bots and spiders.
- Gigablast is an alternative, as you can make your own personal search engine by entering up to 200 sites to search, but then search results are collated
- The beauty of A9 OpenSearch is you can choose from the list of websites you want to include in your search at the time of searching
Here is a great article that explained it perfectly.
Also check out Micro Persuasion’s post.
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