Yahoo7's Alpha brings Web 2.0 to searching

Yahoo7's Alpha brings Web 2.0 to searching

By Stuart Corner
Thursday, 19 July 2007

Yahoo7, the joint venture that represents Yahoo! in Australia has developed Alpha (http://au.alpha.yahoo.com) , a search portal that users can customise so as to display, on a single page, the result of a search across multiple sites of their own choosing. It's a great idea.

Users can also determine how much space on the page the results for each search site take up, and decide whether results should be displayed in normal text format or, for an image site such as YouTube, whether the results should be displayed as images. Profiles can be stored for future use and shared with other users.

Brett Poole, head of search at Yahoo!7, says the project originated out of Yahoo7's version of the Yahoo 'Hack Day' where development staff are given one day a week to work on projects of their own choosing. Alpha has had a low key promotion for several months and is being continually fine tuned based on users feedback in preparation for a full-scale launch.

For example users conducting and image search on Yahoo's Australian site see at the bottom of the results page a link saying "More...images on alpha! Clicking on the link displays the same search result in alpha's image-optimised profile page. A small, and fairly inconspicuous link "customise my search" takes the user to Alpha's profile customisation page.

Users can also create a custom profile then add a search box to their own web site that will use this profile for any search results. So whereas most sites today simply offer the option of searching the site or the Web, with an Alpha search box the results of both searches can be displayed simultaneously: using Yahoo!, Google or any other standard search site for the main web search.

I can see this really taking off. The operator of any specialist interest site could create a search profile with Alpha specific to the site's area of interest. As the user community explores the possibilities a whole range of publicly available special interest profiles could be developed

Poole explained that the main enabler of Alpha is OpenSearch, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenSearch. a collection of technologies that allow publishing of search results in a format suitable for syndication, via RSS.

For sites that support OpenSearch, Alpha is able to conduct a search and present the results in a manner identical to the search being conducted directly on that site. However users can add any site to their custom profile and, if it does not support OpenSearch the results are equivalent to conducting a standard Yahoo search constrained to that site. Poole said this does not produce results equivalent to conducting the search natively on the site because the search is unable to make use of whatever algorithms the site uses to optimise and prioritise results.

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