Good day for a first official post... Jeff B. and A9 announced today at Etech new functionality that allows users to add their own "columns" of search-able content to their result view. They want to open up their experience by allowing any content creator with search functionality the ability to syndicate their search through A9's system. They already offer dozens of choices including, flickr, New York Times, Wikipedia, "Top Blogs", furl, Google sponsored links and some small e-commerce providers... You can see this developing into a My Yahoo! for search.
I really like their button interface. It's very clean and I feel comfortable using it. But I see it becoming information overload pretty quickly. One set of results is difficult enough to sort through and I don't see them solving that problem yet. They still offer the typical display of google SR. It gets even more difficult when you add more columns. The results squish together and become almost unreadable.
Question of the moment... why can't you search through Amazon's entire catalog of products with A9?
-beach
