Everything A9 does totally blows my mind. Yet, I still use Google. Maybe there is something to say for brand loyalty.

Their newest innovation is A9.com > OpenSearch, a concept which is blindingly obvious, yet totally new. Instead of offering a search engine, with display, advertising, and content (e.g. "results") in the same context (e.g. a web page), A9's OpenSearch is about offering search as a series of structured data feeds. This separates the search results from the search engine much in the way RSS separates blog content from blog design.

You could imagine a world of search, with spider-based broad databases like Google mixing with vertical search engines, proprietary databases, etc. The reader could be a website aggregator like A9, a desktop application like Sherlock, or a corporate intranet application. Heck, search providers could charge some parties for access to their feeds!