Yahoo's new search

http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20070405-yahoo-prepares-to-take-on-google-with-new-search-interface.html
Yahoo has a new search feature. It's a search aggregator. It takes search results from multiple search engines and then compiles them on one page, on Yahoo.

That's ..... quite okay, i think? Yes, I would love to have multiple search results collated from various search engines. However...

Using Yahoo's new search engine, Alpha, would require me going out of my way to the Alpha page to use it. They'll have to put it as a option beside their main search bar if anyone's going to be bothered with Alpha.

I have to login to Yahoo, customize my own search page, for me to have results from other pages listed. Alpha's default search engines, the notable ones, are from Wiki, Flickr, Ask.com and YouTube. Disappointing, if any. Not only must I be aware of how search engine's parse their URLs [That's easy. It's in the top of your address bar. But you should see the no of people who don't know that. If i could quote a source i would.], I would also need to actually be bothered to do that. What a chore!

Results in their own separate tabs?! WTH! I have to click on a separate tab listed "YouTube" or "Wikipedia", then using funky scripting [AJAX, which means plenty of pretty slow lag time like Hotmail's. Or maybe fast like Gmail's?], they clear your screen of the default Yahoo search results and put up YouTube's or Wikipedia's search. Hello..... This is totally not making sense. The only reason why I wanted to aggregate searches is because I want to have the most comprehensive results! I don't really need YouTube results, or Wikipedia results! If I wanted Wikipedia, all I have to do is just type Wikipedia along with my search terms in Google! If i wanted YouTube, I'll go YouTube!!! They have featured movies and preview screenshots in their homepage! Thing is, I want my aggregated results ON THE SAME PAGE. I don't want to have them in their own separate pages.

Finally, will my results conflict with each other? Often, I will get multiple results from the same website, as each search engine provides its own variant of the link. Yahoo obviously isn't good enough to filter out results belonging to the same URL. This problem is especially pertinent to Yahoo too. Normally, if the results from the diff engines are all on the same page, it'll be easy to double-check which results are similar and repeated. But if they're on different pages, doing that checking will be a big problem.

On the whole, when I first read about Yahoo's new search, a search aggregator named Alpha, I was having high hopes for Yahoo, though i wasn't expecting it to affect the visitor turnrate much. Now, after having seen their search first-hand, and even without doing so much as a single search, i can safely proclaim, IT SUCKS.

Yahoo, I'm very disappointed in you. You could do a search engine aggregator so much better than that pitiful thing you call Alpha. Alpha? That lousy piece of idea would be better off in the trashbin of concepts than to even be developed.

Take a page out of MetaCrawler.com's book, Yahoo. It's quite a good search engine. Personally, I've been using it as an alternative to Google, far more than i use Yahoo. MetaCrawler is ALSO a search aggregator. However, as you probably would see if you visited MetaCrawler.com, although it does not provide customized searches from diff engines [well, it does, but not very], it does a very good job in collected results from Google and Yahoo and combine them with its own. Metacrawler ftw! compared to Yahoo, that is.

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