Au.Alpha.Yahoo.com - A Federated Search Engine from Yahoo

From Yahoo comes the new federated search engine Alpha. Federated search portals, should you be wondering, are able to broadcast queries across multiple databases and thus retrieve information from disparate sources in a succinct and merged form, without replicated results. The basic gist is, you get to search more sources from one page; with Alpha, if you have a Yahoo login you can customize your sources and even add your own. Alpha pulls results from Open Search sites and databases that syndicate their results. The interface is clean and overall navigation is a breeze. As the site´s still in Beta there may be a few kinks that need to be worked out, but the possibilities are promising.

“Alpha is a new beta product from Yahoo! that introduces the concept of Federated Search. With Alpha, you can search across many different search indices all on one page. Also, if you have a Yahoo! ID, you can log in to personalise your experience by moving the search sources around to suit you, or adding completely new ones of your own.”

Federated searching and Open Search open up broader avenues in web searching; traditional search engines can´t access a great deal of info on the web which means some of the most interesting content is being missed simply because one single search engine can´t index the results. Federated searching seeks to change this. Users will find better, more varied results within one browser.

Open Search is relatively new, and there are limits as to what it covers. Federated search engines cannot, therefore, search all databases, especially those that do require authentication. As such, will users find the results useful, or much different from Google queries?