(2005-03-16) Amazon Open Search

Amazon's A9 Search Engine is pushing an Open Search model which provides search results as RSS. Jeff Bezos is at ETech now, and his demo includes incorporating PubMed search results into more general info.

Strangely, this seems to focus on providing side-by-side search results from multiple sources. At MedScape we played with this idea a lot (internal articles vs PubMed abstracts vs drug database) and dropped it because the Context-s didn't map well (and it doubled your CPU cost, which we cared about in those cheaper days).

Hmm, here's an interesting idea - a directory of VerticalSearch Engine-s with a top layer of semantic magic to suggest sources based on your search term...