Vertical Search and A9

Jeff Bezos

http://conferences.oreillynet.com/cs/et2005/view/e_sess/7054

At the O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference

San Diego, California, 15 March 2005

Impressionistic transcript by

Cory Doctorow

doctorow@craphound.com

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I'm going to talk about "vertical search" and the extensions A9 has made to RSS to make it possible to syndicate search.

[[Demo problems -- Microsoft update wants to fix his computer, quits out of PowerPoint, etc etc -- lots of laughter, "The important thing is for the presenter to remain calm"]]

There are lots of things you can do if you're a domain expert in vertical search. If you're a medical pro and you search on Vioxx, you'll get different results from Web search and PubMed.

The data-sets are different and the relevance ranking and the transformations on the query are all different too.

PubMed takes the user-query and does sophisticated transformations, e.g. "Heart attack" into many medical terms.

The Web-search on Vioxx is mostly about class-action lawsuits, while the vertical is about medical info.

A9.com has a visual metaphor for vertical search -- columns for web results, image results, and reference results, your bookmarks, etc...

What we want to do at A9.com is have thousands of these columns and let people choose from thousands of columns. We need to consume search to make this possible. We can't do this with our own team. 

We've added a few tags to RSS to make OS RSS -- so that you can give back total number of results in a search, the starting index, and the number of results you're returning. People can now syndicate search.

Click on "see more columns" on A9 results and you can add the list of columns to your result pages. [[Ed: this is getting closer to my pipe-dream of "Idiosyncratic Google"]]

It's easy to syndicate your search results by adding a custom column -- create a tiny piece of XML that gives A9 all the info it needs to add the column to A9. There's a builderator that does this and lets you insert the output into your URLs.

[[He demos a Koders column that lets you add search for open source code to A9]] Anyone can see this at A9 and remix it.