Recovering nicely from the first awkward demo moment of Etech, Amazon boss Jeff Bezos announced OSRSS, for Open Search RSS, a small set of extensions to RSS that enable vertical search.

In his demo he showed that you get a very different set of results depending on which database you search. "If you search the Web for 'Vioxx,' you'll get the impression that Vioxx is about class action lawsuits. If you search the medical database PubMed you'll get very different results" -- specific medical and pharmacological results. "PubMed actually does sophisticated translations from search term to specific medical terms."

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When a searchable database uses the OSRSS code to identify itself, it becomes essentially a "channel" to A9, and users can select which databases they want to see results from.

OSRSS consists of three simple extensions to RSS that simply state total results, a starting index, and number of items per page.

So now A9.com is essentially a web-based aggregator of OSRSS feeds. Think of it as My Yahoo for vertical search. And, Jeff says, "I doubt very much whether A9 will be the only site that wants to" aggregate vertical searches.

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