That John Martin

I am a big A9 fan. Huge. Before A9, search for me was all about the Google toolbar, but when I realized that A9 had persistent bookmarks and browsing history that are accessible not only from the toolbar but also through a web interface, I was sold. Since then, with the introduction of OpenSearch and UI updates, things have only improved.

One thing that bugs me though is that there is no way to choose the type of search that you want to do (or in A9-speak, the columns you want to use) before getting to the results page. So, if I am after a dictionary definition, unless I keep the relevant column permanently open on my results page, I have to do the search, and then toggle the column. Instead, it would be great if I could either select my search type from a drop-down menu that was dynamically populated with my active columns, or, even better, if I could use a text command prefix within the search box itself e.g. “ref pedantic” for an Answers.com reference search, or “amazon purple cow” for an Amazon search.

Just a thought…

This entry was posted on Sunday, April 17th, 2005 at 12:10 am and is filed under uncategorized.