Yahoo has quietly launched its Australian-developed meta-search engine, called “Alpha” for public beta testing, which lets users query sites like Flickr, YouTube and Wikipedia, in addition to the regular Yahoo web search.

Alpha, which is hosted on an Australian domain, is part of a new breed of personalized, roll-your-own search products. Users can add, remove and rearrange search engine components, which will make it easier for users to tailor search sites to reflect their interest.

“[Alpha] allows you to search all of your favorite search engines from the ease of just one page,” said Brett Poole, a search engineer at Yahoo7 who spearheaded the site’s development.

The default results page shows a list of Web sites on the left hand column and six specialty search result boxes on the right hand column. The specialty boxes display results from Flickr photo service, the Answers question-and-answer service, Yahoo News, Google’s YouTube video site, and Wikipedia. It also has a box for displaying search ads from Yahoo’s online ad network.

The idea for Alpha came out during the Hack Day, Poole said.

“Yahoo globally has a day called Hack Day and it is really a day for innovation, which basically means we all get the day off to actually sit down and code up new ideas for any part of the business,” said Poole.

Yahoo Alpha seems similar in concept to Google’s Co-op search service, as well as Rollyo, a social custom search engine.

Yahoo has not indicated when or if Alpha will be rolled out as an official, final product.

“We are getting a lot of feedback about what it [Alpha] means and what it can do and a lot of people are suggesting things, so we are just going to sit back for a while and gather a whole lot of feedback,” said Poole.

Related:

Entry was posted on Friday, April 6th, 2007 at 5:07 am under Internet.

Read more entries by Ruben Francia.
Stumble It!