Yahoo is responding to Google’s co-op, a platform that allows you to customize your search experience by introducing Yahoo! Alpha – in beta. Much like Google’s version, Yahoo Alpha will enable you to create your very own personalized search engine homepage.
Using a drag-n-drop interface (think NetVibes), users are able to create their search engine page. If you visit the new Alpha site, you’ll notice that it searches Yahoo, but also provides search results from services like Flickr photos, Yahoo!7 Answers, YouTube, Yahoo!7 News Search, and Wikipedia.
You can even build your own search module using sites of your choice, assuming that the site provides the search results in the form of a RSS feed.
Essentially, it’s a tool that will help you perform multiple searches at one time by taking the results from the different sources and aggregating them all onto one page. While it is much like Google’s co-op, it’s also a lot like Google’s test site Searchmash, with a very similar interface(comparison above).
All in all, it’s a convenient way to search when you have an assortment of results to choose from like photos and videos.
Source: Digital Inspiration
What’s with these “Yahoo!7 _________” services? What does it mean and why?
It’s the Yahoo service in Australia, and currently Yahoo! Alpha is only available using the Australian domain for now, and I’m sure they’ll be expanding it.
Aha, I was wondering why the service had au in the URL. I’m guessing the 7 has to do with channel 7 since it’s shown at the top on au.yahoo.com. Yahoo can vary a lot for different regions. It’s far more than just language. I wonder why?
I don’t know why they differ so much…that’s something I wonder about a lot of sites. I guess it all depends on what their cultures are used to and what’s popular there?
I heard some foreign Yahoo! mail domains get free POP3. Here in the US we have to pay $. Also, they released Y! mail beta publicly in Germany and UK months b4 here. It seems like we get the worst deal here in the US.
That’s funny you say that because people outside of the US always say that they’re the ones that have to wait.
Yeah, I have heard that foreign Yahoo! domains get free POP3 access, but I think there was some logical reason for it. All I know is that a lot of my friends use GMail because of the free POP3 access so I think Yahoo! is doing themselves a disservice by charing U.S. customers for it.
The thing is, though, Yahoo! makes all their cash from ads, and people don’t see Yahoo!’s ads in their desktop mail clients. If they give free POP3 they don’t make any money off the users who use it. I heard there’s software that lets you get POP3 for free. You can find ways to block the ads as well.
That’s true…they can’t make money from ads if users have POP3 access, but if they offer it to other countries then I would think that it would be a worldwide thing? Not only that but Gmail offers it for free and doesn’t seem to care about not making money off of the ads because of it.
But Google really doesn’t make much cash at all from Gmail. They get it all off their search engine. Yahoo!, on the other hand, probably makes much more of their revenue off of Email.