I have been reading up on the A9.com [tag]OpenSearch[/tag].  While I haven’t used the [tag]A9[/tag] search much to date, it seems like it has great potential…  Letting the users choose which search facilities to use, when they want.  For example, you can have one column be Web Results and another be Price Comparison or Shopping results.  Or if you are looking for a Book by a certain author, one column could be book results, while another is Images of the Author… Its all up to you.

So I have added the SecretPrices.com [tag]comparison shopping[/tag] search engine to A9 OpenSearch.  You test it out by clicking here to choose your A9 OpenSearch columns and then by typing in “secret” in the textbox that says “type here to find columns”.

It seems the right thing to do as it will be incorporated in IE7 (beta 2)… Nathan Weinberg states “The IE team says they are working with [tag]Amazon[/tag] to support OpenSearch in [tag]IE7[/tag], letting users populate IE with oodles of search engines” in his article.

The greatness that lies within the concept is that any more search aggregators can utilize it once it has been setup.  Of course I am sure there is licensing issues and such for usage, but thats another story.

More reading about IE7 and A9:
Behind the Scenes at Microsoft, A9, and Amazon (AWS Blog)
Microsoft IE7 + A9 Opensearch – a marriage made in Open heaven (panlibus at Tails.com)