ChorroSearch Open Search
You’ve probably heard about Open Search, A9’s format which allows anyone to be a search source for A9.com. Despite the name of the technology, the registry of sources is not open to the public, only to A9. A few of my fellow students have changed this by creating the ChorroSearch Open Search Registry. One of my professors, David Wolber explains:
Chris Fraschetti and Deniz Efendioglu, two students in my Internet Systems Research course, developed this metasearch tool based on A9’s Open Search protocol. It displays results in a column-based manner similar to A9’s client. It also allows information sources to register and immediately have their data searchable to ChorroSearch or any other client that uses ChorroSearch’s open registry (as far as I know, A9 doesn’t provide an open xml-based list of registered opensearch sources). The guys also developed ‘Got Chorro?’ which allows an ordinary user to create a search engine from documents on their desktop, register as an opensearch source, and automatically become a producer of information as well as a consumer (a prosumer).
(Via The Absent-Minded Professor.)
