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April 25, 2007
The clever folks down under at Yahoo!7 have been very busy lately; check out their fine new toy at au.alpha.yahoo.com. If you've ever wondered what a crisp, clean, search interface to Yahoo! (and many other sources of data) might look like, this is it.
Featuring results from Yahoo! Search, Flickr, Answers, and News, the Alpha Beta uses several YUI libraries to do its magic, with a little help from some OpenSearch-friendly sites, such as Wikipedia and YouTube.
Like an increasing number of interesting Yahoo! efforts, Alpha Beta began as a Hack Day project. Here are a few words of explanation from team member Brett Poole:
"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 (at least those who syndicate their search results via OpenSearch RSS).
We also decided to add a sharing element for logged in users of the site. Now, if you decide to share your personalised url with others, they can view and effectively use the search configuration you have developed.
We thought the idea was good enough to develop further into a public beta site and get a few ideas from the Australian search community at large.
And, yes, this is indeed a beta, so we expect there are many many improvements to make along the way, so be sure to tell us what you think!"
Please check in at the Alpha Beta blog with questions or comments; the team would love to hear from you.
Kent Brewster, Yahoo! Developer Network
Posted at April 25, 2007 8:54 AM
This is definitely a direction yahoo as a whole should be taking. Yahoo has been too cluttered for far too long. Users appreciate a clean, straightforward and fast interface.
Posted by: Benjamin Ranck at May 22, 2007 12:45 PM
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