Werner blogs about A9's new OpenSearch. From the site:

OpenSearch is a collection of technologies, all built on top of popular open standards, to allow content providers to publish their search results in a format suitable for syndication. [...]

Many sites today return search results as an tightly integrated part of the website itself. Unfortunately, those search results can't be easily reused or made available elsewhere, as they are usually wrapped in HTML and don't follow any one convention. OpenSearch offers an alternative: an open format that will enable those search results to be displayed anywhere, anytime. Rather than introduce yet another proprietary or closed protocol, OpenSearch is a straightforward and backward-compatible extension of RSS 2.0, the widely adopted XML-based format for content syndication.

First Yahoo and now A9 are now pushing the boundaries of Search APIs. Google's API, sadly, remains in its usual we-don't-seem-to-know-what-to-do-with-this-or-want-to-support-it state. Maybe all of these announcements will spur Google to crank it up.