idgetsWay

Patrick April 7th, 2007

The beta release of Alpha, a new search engine from the Yahoo guys down under, features widgets as a key part of the experience. The main search results appear in the main content section of screen, as you would expect. But instead of the sponsored results that appear in the right-hand column of familiar sites like Google, there are a number of widgets delivering search results specific to the widget’s focus or parameters.

The widgets include Yahoo web search, Flickr photos, Yahoo Answers, Yahoo News, YouTube, Wikipedia, and Sponsored Results.These are referred to on Alpha as “info sources,” and a “Customise this page” link on the results page allows users to determine which info sources are displayed along with results. All of the the currently available info sources are set to display by default, but you can remove them. You can also drag-and-drop them to rearrange them on the page. For example, the Yahoo web search widget is set to display as the main content element on the page by default, with all the others showing in the right column; if you are more interested in news results, you can swap the two.

You can also create your own Alpha search widgets. I added the IdgetsWay RSS feed, and it worked quite well. Presumedly, you can add any URL to search. Finally, you can choose to make your layout of Alpha public or private.

Essentially, what Yahoo has done here is to extend the My Yahoo customization functionality to search results. Some consider My Yahoo the grandfather of the modern webtop widget, and this is an interesting extension of the concept. I can imagine using it to create a custom search results screen for a particular group of companies (perhaps for competitive analysis, for example), blogs covering a certain industry like technology, or e-commerce sites so I can shop for the best deals on a product. This does seem to be quite useful, but I’lll withhold judgment until I’ve had more time to experiment with it.

Alpha is, however, yet another example of how widgets and widget-like functionality can be used to customize the web at a very granular level.

Technorati Tags: widgets, gadgets, yahoo, search, syndication

• web
• Comments(0)