A9.com CEO on the record
Washington Posts's Leslie Walker hosted an online discussion earlier today about the future of Web search with Udi Manber, the CEO of Amazon's new search service, A9.com. You can read a transcript of the discussion here. Among other things, he says:
I am a strong believer in developing communities on the web. In fact, the web is what it is today mostly because communities were encouraged right from the beginning. One example of what we are doing in this area is our OpenSearch initiative, where we allow anyone to publish and syndicate search results though an extension to RSS. As a result, more than a hundred different search columns were added by users to A9, and every user can select any one of them as part of their search results.