DEBRIS.COMgood for a laugh, or possibly an aneurysm

The A9 team at Amazon.com launched a new extension to their search engine, just in time for ETECH. Jeff Bezos announced it during this morning’s “High-Order Bits” presentations.

By default, A9.com’s search results contain three columns: web results, image results, and a button column that gives one-click access to other types of results, such as Movies and Books. These buttons provide functionality similar to the text links at the top of both Google’s and Yahoo’s results pages, which offer access to images, USENET, news, Yahoo’s directory, Froogal, etc.

A9 allows users to customize their search-result columns. Users can personalize their results pages to show the types of documents they’re most likely to be searching for. This is a cool thing, and will soon be a feature of every major search engine.

But the really cool announcement of the day is that developers can create their own A9 search columns. This allows what Bezos called “domain experts” to syndicate “vertical search” results. For example, I could build an A9 search-results column for debris.com, if in fact I’d written enough about a particular topic that merited a syndicated search feed to a major search engine.

There are already dozens of custom syndicated vertical-search result “columns” available, including the NYTimes, Flickr, PubMed, NASA, etc. I predict the number will grow very quickly, as site owners realize the value of putting their content in front of the eyeballs of A9 users.

In a sense, A9’s OpenSearch technology is like Apple’s Sherlock, which is a search technology that accepts plug-ins to provide vertical search results via syndication. Two key differences are that OpenSearch is built on open standards like RSS, and A9 is a website (available to 100% of web users) whereas Sherlock is a proprietary software product (available to ~5% of computer users).

See also Cory Doctorow’s notes: Bezos on vertical search and A9