Yahoo Launches Alpha, Do It Yourself Metasearch Engine

Yahoo has quietly launched on Thursday a new search engine, called “Alpha”. Still in its Beta phase and currently hosted on its Yahoo Australian domain, the Metasearch engine allows users to customize their search engine results pulled from multiple websites via RSS, like Flickr Photos, Wikipedia, and YouTube. You can take it for a test drive by clicking here.

Alpha also displays all the web searched results onto one page using Ajax. For readers who are not familiar with the Ajax-Web 2.0 hype, click here to read all about it.

Under the hood

With its simple interface featuring only two tabs, the “change my layout” tab includes a feature that allows users the ability to rearrange search results box locations, using a simple drag-and-drop user interface.

The second tab “add custom info source”, includes three text boxes that allows users to enter the name of the website, RSS feed URL, and a query feature to filter the website searched source for specific keywords. This is a useful feature for anyone who is only interested, for example, in Bungee Jumping from a particular website that supports RSS.

Also on the second tab, it displays two privacy options, which asks users to choose whether they want their customized search engine to be shared with others, with two options public or private. Users can also choose how their web results should be displayed, choosing from web listing or image only display. Although unimpressed with its lack of new concepts and foresight, Yahoo still deserves a bronze medal for its effort.

However it’s slow in reacting to Google’s recently launched similar website, oh yes, you guessed it, another custom search engine called “Co-op”, which allows users to also customize their search results using the same method as Yahoo’s Alpha. Another social custom search engine that’s also worth mentioning, a website called Rollyo, also uses a very similar method.

Somehow Yahoo’s past successful ideas usually prevailed in competing with Google through acquisitions and not through innovations. With that said, the internet search engine giant is clearly aiming and trying very hard to capitalize on the latest craze of social networks, and custom search engines.

“Whilst aggregating feeds on one page is nothing new, we wanted to take a federated search concept one step further. With this beta, we have introduced personalisation elements that not only allow users to customise their view, but also to add their favourite search service”, said Brett Poole, Alpha Lead Developer and Member of Yahoo7 Search Team, Yahoo Australia.

Alpha uses search results presentation method, called OpenSearch format, a method that allows search engines to aggregate RSS and Atom, Metadata feeds into search results from any website that supports RSS as a minimum requirement for results to be pulled and filtered.

Trackback-URL

Source : caribjournal.com