Spotted via Micro Persuasion and Digital Inspiration, Yahoo’s just launched Alpha (in beta version, natch). Both of the aforementioned blogs call Alpha a customized search engine similar to Google Custom Search Engine, but Alpha is really more of a multi-search tool that submits your query to multiple sources and aggregates results from all of them on one page.

By default, Yahoo web search results appear on the left, with drop down boxes on the right providing access to Flickr photos, Yahoo Answers, YouTube, Yahoo News, Wikipedia and Yahoo Sponsored results. You can remove any of these, or add any additional source (thus the customized comparison) provided it has an RSS feed. You can also easily change the layout of your Alpha page.

Rather than a true custom search engine, Alpha looks more like a Yahoo experiment to surface more of its deep content through a single query, similar to Google’s OneBox and Ask’s Smart Answers. I’ve got a request into Yahoo for more information and I’ll post an update when I’ve learned more.

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