AUSSIE-made SUPER SEARCH engine

[KiwiCoromandel]

Yahoo's Australian engineers have just taken the wraps off their first stand-alone search project - a fully customisable search engine through which users can perform Flickr, Wikipedia, YouTube and Yahoo search queries simultaneously.

The site, dubbed "Alpha", is part of a new breed of personalised, roll-your-own search products.

It is similar to Google's Co-op and the smaller US start-up, Rollyo.

"[Alpha] allows you to search all of your favourite search engines from the ease of just one page," said Brett Poole, a search engineer at Yahoo7 who spearheaded the site's development.

After it was quietly turned on yesterday, word of Alpha's existence spread globally within hours.

Poole was astonished at the initial publicity as no marketing had been conducted whatsoever.

"We put it out for very limited testing - we are not quite sure how it spread as fast and wide as it did," he said.

"It is a very cool idea that we thought we would throw out there and let people have a look at."

The site incorporates Yahoo's regular web search function, but, in addition to this, can display results from Wikipedia, Yahoo7 Answers, Flickr and YouTube.

"We chose those because we know a lot of Australians visit those sites," said Poole, adding that more sites would be added as the service matured.

Alpha has so far been met with a mixed reception from critics; Michael Arrington, of the popular TechCrunch website that reviews new web services, described it as "confusing" and "abstruse".

But Poole readily acknowledged that Alpha was still "a very early stage prototype" that would continually be updated, based on user feedback.

"Yahoo globally has a day called Hack Day and it is really a day for innovation, which basically means we all get the day off to actually sit down and code up new ideas for any part of the business," said Poole.

"This is an idea that came out of Hack Day."

It has not yet been decided when or if Alpha will be rolled out as an official, final product.

"We are getting a lot of feedback about what it [Alpha] means and what it can do and a lot of people are suggesting things, so we are just going to sit back for a while and gather a whole lot of feedback," said Poole.

source:AP

image:AP:YAHOO's ALPHA search engine, developed by its Australian engineers, lets users query sites like Flickr, YouTube and Wikipedia, in addition to the regular Yahoo web search.