A new way to search?

Recently Nature.com implemented a new tool for searching the content of the Journal Nature called, appropriately, Nature.com Opensearch.
Over the course of the semester we have examined a many solutions and plans for storing data in repositories and in digital libraries, but the storage of information in these “data silos” is just one part of the data issue. Another piece of the puzzle is how data is found in a digital repository and this is the focus of natures new search strategy. What Nature.com has done is utilized the Opensearch specifications along with CQL to allow for the data in their collection to be searched freely by anyone who would like to build a widget to do so. Not a very revealing sentence I know, believe me I know, so let’s delve.
Opensearch is a set of specifications developed by Amazon (the geniuses who brought you the mechanical Turk) which are meant to allow information to be searched and used in ways that traditional search engines cannot.
Nature.com combined this set of specifications with the CQL, Contextual Query Language, which searches based on ‘semantic’ relationships rather than tradition syntax. This combined methodology offers several dimensions of flexibility to the system at Nature.com.
First the Open side of the application means that it can be embedded in a number of places (such as blogs etc) and results returned in any method that utilizes a standard XML format. The second and in my mind much more interesting aspect of this is that it allows a user to create specific search methodologies and returns. This page has several really nice examples.
Now what does this mean for us. Well in the end in this particular implementation is kind of limited in use. This is a pay Journal, so while anyone can see the articles that are returned not everyone will have access to the content of those article. Researchers with institutional access to the Journal will no doubt find this far more useful that the lay person. In the end what I am more interested in is the idea of turning the search function over to the general population. The institution in this case has set up a framework and turned access (read only, of course) over to anyone who might have a need for it. This way of searching where the data sets conform to standards and the applications which search them are fluid and changeable point to the promise that well curated digital collections can hold.