Yahoo! Search - Alpha

au.alpha.yahoo.com

The Search industry was a major focus during my time at Yahoo!. The concept of Alpha was to offer a truly open Federated Search platform: basically, Alpha returned many types of search results at once (web, image, video, news, etc) and from more than one search provider. For instance, your Alpha search could return Yahoo! Search results alongside Google Image Search results and YouTube video results simultaneously, and any other Search Engine they cared to add. The user had total control over their search experience - this was truly disruptive to the industry, even ourselves: if users chose not to include any Yahoo! Search platforms in their results, it would motivate us to improve our own technology.

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My task was to create HTML, CSS and JavaScript for the site, with a strict focus on keeping the homepage and search results pages as small and fast as possible, anticipating extremely high download rates as are common with Search Engines. In contrast, we developed a cutting-edge drag-and-drop interface on the much weightier user preferences page, to facilitate user changes to their search providers in an intuitive manner.

Yahoo! Alpha Search made headlines across the world media, including The Sydney Morning Herald, The Age, The Times (UK), Wired (USA) - with technical journalists eager to predict Australia was a test-case for a universal rollout across the Yahoo! Network, replacing existing Yahoo! Search.

This had the desired effect, shaking up the Search landscape locally and abroad, with many copycat efforts quickly being rushed out by our competitors.