You've not heard much from the Alpha team lately, as we've been working on some very neat stuff for Yahoo!7 Search.

Some of them include the local launches of SearchMonkey, SearchScan and Maps!

However, in the background we've been making major upgrades to Alpha's back end to help other sites add a federated search experience using Alpha's core technology.

Today, our News team launched a brand new site for news lovers, featuring the best of Australian news providers.

As part of this launch, Yahoo!7 News also became the first site to use the Alpha "Combo Search" features, allowing you to get more searching done, all in one search.

For example, today's news is all about Amy Winehouse allegedly punching one of the fans attending her concert, and also reported to be making an appearance at the famous Madam Tussaud's wax museum in London.

Searching the news now gives you a broader view of the concept in an open and clean presentation format.

This new method of distributing federations is (of course) in beta, but we will continue to work hard to bring Alpha results to a search near you.

Cheers
Brett
Yahoo!7 Search Team

Just click the "Try Alpha Search" link above the standard search button, and you'll see the very stylish (some say sexy) blue Alpha search box.

You'll also notice that the tabs disappear from above the search box, since we put multiple search types in the one view. Also gone is the Australian results checkbox, as now you get Australian results along side global ones. (Bewdy!) And of course the TriggerWord and Goto features work just as they do from any other Alpha search box.

So give it a try, and as always, don't be shy to let us know what you think. We really appreciate all the great feedback we've had so far and rest assured we're working on bringing you some cool new features very soon.

Cheers,

Justin

Goto is a new search box function that will take you directly to the first search result for a web search, from any Alpha search box. For example, searching for "goto alpha beta", while a little redundant, will take you directly to the Alpha home page.

Far more useful examples include:

• "goto weather" - Australian Bureau of Meteorology ("goto bom" also works quite nicely)
• "goto news" - CNN
• "goto yahoo news" - news.yahoo.com
• "goto yahoo7 news" - au.news.yahoo.com
• "goto australian" - The Australian news website
• "goto smh" - Sydney Morning Herald news website
• "goto melbourne rail timetable" – Connex online train timetable, Melbourne
• "goto heaven" - Wikipedia entry for heaven. (If only it were that easy!)

You get the idea. It works in a similar way to TriggerWords, but for navigational queries. As mentioned, the good news is that it works from any Alpha search box, even the Firefox and IE ones! I hope you find this feature as fun and useful as we have.

We've also made some minor cosmetic changes, including replacing the blurry text in the preferences page with Latin text (easier on the eyes) and other miscellaneous usability improvements.

Wether you love or hate these new features, you can now let us know via the new feedback form. You no longer need to be signed in to Yahoo to tell us what you think of Alpha. We've already had some great feedback from this form, some of which will be rolled into the next release.

Thanks for reading and looking forward to bringing you some new features very soon!

Cheers!

Justin O'Neill
Yahoo!7 Search Team

So, in this release, we put some more effort into offering different ways to quickly navigate to intent based search profiles. Now, instead of choosing your search on the homepage of Alpha, you can use an easy shortcut right inline with your search term. We call them TriggerWords.

"How can I use these TriggerWords?" I hear you cry. Well, you may simply stumble over them while searching. This is because we have mapped several TriggerWords to existing profiles. We've described them here and in the FAQ:

Image profile --> image, pic, photo, i (eg. pasha bulker pics)
News profile --> news, n (eg. pasha bulker news)
Reference profile --> reference, ref, r (eg. pasha bulker ref)
You can also easily return to your profile or the system default by using:
My Profile --> my, m (eg. pasha bulker m)
Default profile --> default, d (eg. pasha bulker d)

The only thing you need to remember is to put the TriggerWord at the end of your search term for the action to happen.

Also, if for some wacky reason you actually wanted to search exactly the original term, we added an alert box with a handy link just for this purpose, this allows you to carry out your original search, unaltered.

Lastly, if you've been dying for the opportunity to Alpha-ise your site, we added a section that provides easy cut-and-paste code for anyone wanting to sport an alarmingly attractive Alpha search box on their blog or website.

Remember of course you can configure your results perfectly tailored for your users needs.

That's all for this release, enjoy!

Today we've launched multiple search profiles to access pre-set configurations based on search intent.
On the Alpha homepage you'll notice a new dropdown function underneath the search box.

This toggle allows you to easily fall into a "search mode". For example, if you just want to see images, news, or research material the pre-set configurations are created to give you the best set of results from the sources available to Alpha.

- Image and video detail overlay

Speaking of images, you'll also notice in this release, an upgrade to the image/video results that allows you to rollover thumbnails and easily read supporting information. This will usually be the title and description of the file e.g.:

- Default experience

We have also made improvements to the default (logged out) experience with the addition of the following features:

• Some default modules are automatically opened (Logged in users can now choose what to have open and closed)
• There is no longer a requirement to be logged in for basic customisation (moving the modules around)

Hope you like the new toys!

Enjoy
Brett Poole
Yahoo!7 Search Team

New this week: Search OpenSearch (SOS) - a new way to find OpenSearch sources of information.

Rather than completing the existing (and a little confusing) process of entering an opensearch URL, you can now add the SOS module and search for new information sources related to keywords that describe them. e.g. Searching for "sport" will return a list of OpenSearch sources specific to sport.

Here is a quick tutorial on how to add new sources with SOS:

Step 1: If the module is not there for you already, click "Customise this page" to access your preferences

Step 2: Ensure the OpenSearch checkbox is selected, then click Save.

Step 3: Search for the topic you want and click the SOS twisty to see the OpenSearch results.

Step 4: Success! You have added a custom info source via your new SOS module!

We think this is much easier than the current method, which will remain so you can still add sources not yet listed in SOS.

We have also changed the functionality of the "add custom info source" page. You can now add any URL, not just one that conforms to the OpenSearch standard. This means you can add any website domain and effectively have a site search added as a module. Like this

Got a killer feature in mind? We’d love to hear from you as Alpha is an ongoing work in progress - so just let us know!

Brett Poole
Yahoo!7 Search Team

Apart from that, we've been so busy planning for the next stage I think a recap is in order. I've been reading the hundreds of blogs from around the world, and by far the response has been very positive.

Things people seemed to like the most were:

Great news is, based on your feedback we have also solved the Cmd/Ctrl + Click issue in Safari/Firefox and we're looking at new and interesting ways to simplify the addition of new OpenSearch sources.

The haiku error messages received a mixed response. Many liked them (a lot), others didn't know they were haiku's.

Are they confusing?
If you tell us you like them
we'll create some more.

I've also been playing around with Pipes and have added my first one to Alpha. Plus I tried out Indeed OpenSearch and also added Digg (http://www.digg.com/rss_search?search={searchTerms}&area=all&type=both&section=news) which seems to be working most of the time but might have to tweak the timeout settings a little.

You can check out all of the above changes in action here on our personalised layout.

We now have a big long list of things to do, so I'd better get back to it. Thanks again for all of your suggestions and keep 'em comin'.

Brett Poole
Yahoo!7 Search Team

Yesterday, the Yahoo!7 Search team began testing a beta service called Alpha that was born out of pizza and furious coding.

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!

Brett Poole
Yahoo!7 Search Team

PS: For all you beta testers out there.. we have a few known bugs you might want to be aware of:
1) Image module should show more information to be more helpful.
2) Only signed in users can change their layout rightnow.
3) Some of the errors during adding new user sources are not that helpful, and no feedback when it is successful.
4) You can only have one source in the left hand panel and everything on the right is closed by default. This should be user configurable.
5) Control-click in firefox will open in a new tab plus in the old window.