Yahoo's Alpha in beta

Yahoo has opened its Australian-developed Alpha meta-search engine for public beta testing.

In addition to returning results from Yahoo's own search engine, Alpha also searches for user-generated content at Flickr, Yahoo!7 Answers, YouTube and Wikipedia. Results also come from Yahoo!7 News search, and sponsored search results complete the standard line up.

Results from any these services can be revealed or hidden with a mouse click.

Users with a Yahoo account can select which of these sources are used for their searches, and may add custom information sources providing the sites or search engines concerned support OpenSearch.

Layouts and custom sources may be shared with other users.

According to Yahoo!7 search engineer Brett Poole, Alpha was "born out of pizza and furious coding" as part of Yahoo's annual Hack Day.

Yahoo7 is a joint venture between Yahoo and Seven Network (Australia's largest commercial television network and a major magazine publisher).

[Source: itwire]
Other (related) search engine: http://rollyo.com/