Richard W. Wiggins, Amazon’s New OpenSearch Enables Search Syndication, Information Today, March 28, 2005. Excerpt: 'This month Amazon introduced a new service called OpenSearch, which allows a content provider to syndicate the ability to search the provider's site. Announcing the new service at the O'Reilly Emerging Technology conference, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos proclaimed the OpenSearch mantra: "We want OpenSearch to do for search what RSS has done for content." Amazon describes OpenSearch as an example of "vertical search." At the conference, Bezos demonstrated searching for "Vioxx" in a conventional search engine. Most of the results in a linear hit list will present the most popular Web pages containing that term. But if you use Amazon's A9 as your search engine, you can select PubMed as one of your trusted "columns." Then search A9 for Vioxx and you’ll see scientific and clinical results from PubMed in addition to the traditional Web results....OpenSearch makes it possible for any content provider to export the functionality of its local site search engine to other Web sites. Amazon argues that traditional search engines often cannot do a good job of indexing content at specialized Web sites and that local search engines may understand local content far better: "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" (from the OpenSearch FAQ). ...RSS traditionally has been used to feed news or article headlines to a cooperating Web site, which uses an "aggregator" to interpret the XML content and turn it into HTML, formatted as the receiving site sees fit. OpenSearch allows a content provider such as NASA or The British Library to export search functionality to other sites instead of headlines.'
Posted by
Peter Suber at 3/28/2005 10:45:00 AM.
The open access movement:
Putting peer-reviewed scientific and scholarly literature
on the internet. Making it available free of charge and
free of most copyright and licensing restrictions.
Removing the barriers to serious research.
I recommend the OA tracking project (OATP) as the best way to stay on top of new OA developments. You can read the OATP feed on a blog-like web page or subscribe to it by RSS, email, or Twitter. You can also help build the feed by tagging new developments you encounter.
