As part of a broader project I’m working on, I decided to see if there’s a way I could easily get search results from the web in machine readable fashion. One project to facilitate this is Amazon/A9’s OpenSearch. Alas, it’s useless:
- No big web search provider has signed on to provide machine readable results. Including A9/Alexa! A9 will aggregate search results from different OpenSearch providers for you, it just won’t let you use Alexa’s results elsewhere (search for Alexa on that page)
- even if you were to buy into the search aggregation approach, many (most?) of sources are dead now. A little pruning wouldn’t hurt here guys! (search for IMDB on that page)
I wouldn’t be tempted to be offer my search results in OpenSearch format, because who’s going to use it after I put in the work? And if all that’s available as search sources are mostly broken C and D-list sites, well who cares? It’s a fringe benefit, but not one that I’m looking for and nor likely are you. You’d think that Amazon would use Alexa search results in OpenSearch to “prime the pump”, but I guess being the Nth placed web search service is good enough for them.
Note that there’s a great argument for simply marking up search results with hAtom and use rel=next to navigate to the next page of results, but that’s a topic for another day,
If I have any of my facts wrong here, I apologize in advance: the documentation kind of sucks. I’m also sure there’s some difference between A9, Alexa and Amazon – I really just don’t have the time to work it out.
Further reading
- Alexa’s OpenSearch front page — this is a “search aggregator”
- Add more OpenSearch providers to your search
- OpenSearch.org
- Next up for me: Yahoo’s Search APIs, Yahoo’s SearchMonkey, and Microsoft’s Live Search API.