Yahoo! continues to launch interesting new services. In what I see as a poke at certain products which remain in beta for years the new tool is called Alpha and it is in Beta. That's funny.

Yahoo! describes Alpha (Beta) like this:

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.
This offers a comprehensive search result that's tailored and controlled by you, the searcher!

In other words, its a custom search engine. It looks very nice and clean, like all Yahoo! products do these days:

It's nice that sponsored results have moved to the sidebar. One of the gripes about Yahoo!'s excellent search is the box of sponsored results on top of popular SERP's.

Hattip: Steven Rubel.

About the Author: Ruud Hein

I love helping to make web sites make it. From the ground up if needed. CSS challenges, server-side scripting, user and device friendly JavaScript tricks search engines have no problems with. Tracking how the sites perform and then figuring out how to make that performance and the tracking better. I'm passionate about information. No matter how often I trim my feeds in my feed readers (yes, I use more than one), I always have a couple of hundred in there covering topics ranging from design to usability, from SEO to SEM, from life hacks to productivity blogs, from.... Well, you get the idea, I guess. Knowledge and information management is close to my heart. Has to be with the amount of information I track. My "trusted system" is usually in flux but always at hand and fully searchable. My paid passion job at Search Engine People sees me applying my passions and knowledge to a wide array of problems, ones I usually experience as challenges. It's good to have you here: pleased to meet you!