Yahoo Alpha Search Launches Confusing Beta
Nick Gonzalez
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Yahoo Australia launched a new personalized search engine called Alpha today. Yahoo has another personalized search product called Yahoo Search Builder meant for customizing a Yahoo search engine for your site. A lot of people are calling Alpha a competitor to Google Coop, but it’s not. Yahoo Alpha is a meta search engine with a Netvibes look and feel, letting you type a search in one box and see results amongst several search engines. Google Coop and Rollyo interleave the results from several sources ranked by relevance.
The search results page is a two column layout of search result widgets, with the left column holding the main search results and right column a list of smaller result feeds. The default setup is Yahoo’s website search on the left and smaller Flickr, YouTube, Yahoo news, Wikipedia, and Yahoo Search Marketing widgets on the right. When you enter a search into the main box, results for each of the sources show up in the widgets.
You can customize the results page by reordering widgets on the page and adding new search feed widgets. The process for adding a feed is confusing and required entering an abstruse Opensearch url (e.g http://blogsearch.google.com/blogsearch_feeds?hl=en&q= {searchTerms}&ie=utf-8&num=10&output=rss) and captcha answer. Opensearch is an Amazon A9 technology that lets third parties access your search results via RSS. Each of the widgets can be public or private, although we don’t see a marketplace for these widgets yet.
It’s surprising to see Yahoo come out with a product like this - Rollyo does a much better job with Yahoo’s own API.
way better than google’s
Is it me or Rollyo is getting way more PR than they used to get in the past?
Should we see an acquisition of Joyent/Rollyo in the future?
I fail to see how this is substantially different from A9 Search.
Peanut Butter!
UI is a winner!
Use this UI for the main Yahoo and I’ll *attempt* a goog to yahoo switch.
The search space is getting too crowded…
Looks pretty like live search, still I am hooked onto google’s retro looks!
customer lock in??
Don’t you kids know that the Vegemite manifesto is far, far better?
Griffiths: Show me the ways in which you can customise A9.
I’m sure it’s a great service, but that fact that it’s called “Alpha beta” is sucking up almost all of my attention right now.
Its got a nice user interface which is uncluttered at the moment and on that front it is good. Whether it will be kept like that when it leaves the beta stage I will have to wait and see.
I couldn’t see the results?????????
Wonderful wonderful results, as evidenced by my location at number one for ‘textbooks’. Everyone should use an engine with such obvious discernment.
I do like the looks of it quite a bit.
LMFAO a beta version a frigging program called alpha what the hell was yahoo thinking? whats next a final version called prebeta
Yahoo Alpha (beta) search move into gamma? lol
It is just another aggregator search engine, and I did not find it that attractive, at least not like A9 cause the customizations are limited.
I think it is on the lines of google’s “SearchMash”…..
I am known with my username on the startpage but no longer on the search-results page (then I am suddenly a “guest”)
Anybody else thinking the number of new search engines, search experiments and search betas is getting too high lately?
Here are some that I was able to memorize over the past months…
Wink, Snap, Hakia, Wikio, Wikiseek, Lexxe, ChaCha, Quintura, NosyJoe,
Srchr, Kooltorch, Kartoo, Sphere and how many more?
Here are more for you:
http://www.readwriteweb.com/ar....._mar07.php
Is this a particular sign that the search sector calls for changes and improvements or rush hour for gold miners?
Srchr is still better than both those.
http://www.srchr.com
Well this is interesting… Result page looks a lot like searchmash…
My new project (http://www.fisssh.com) has been taking stick all week for daring to collate search results from various sources and presenting them in (heaven forbid) a two-column format.
My point is… If some users want broader and richer search experiences they might just have to sacrafice the ‘1-10′ list they have become so accustomed to.
At least more competitors are coming out in this space.
it is a meta search engine or not ?