Yahoo! today is expected to launch a beta version of Yahoo! Search Subscriptions to make it easier for users to search sites they subscribe to. From a single search box, subscribers to The Wall
Street Journal Online to
The New England Journal of Medicine to Factiva can find the information they're looking for, without having to be on such publishers' sites.
Search access to
the "deep web," which includes millions of access-restricted sites that search engines typically can't reach, will improve user search results significantly, according to a Yahoo! spokeswoman.
To use Yahoo! Search Subscriptions, users are first expected to select from a list of subscription content sources. When a search is conducted, subscription content appears in their Web results, and
is displayed as a separate module above the standard search results. If users choose to integrate this experience in future Web searches, they can permanently add the list of subscriptions they want
to search via the Yahoo! Search preferences page. In addition, users can restrict searches to specific participating content sources by going to search.yahoo.com/subscriptions.
Other initial
subscription partners include ConsumerReports.org, TheStreet.com, IEEE, and Forrester Research Inc. and Financial Times; selected content from LexisNexis also will be available.
The
service also increases the value of publishers' subscription programs by making their content more readily searchable by the Yahoo! audience of 372 million unique users, the Yahoo! spokeswoman said.
"We are in the very early stages of providing our users with access to the deep web through Yahoo! Search Subscriptions and over the coming months we plan to expand this program to further
accommodate our users' wide range of interests," Eckart Walther, vice president, product management, Yahoo!, said in a statement. "For the first time, publishers can bring content to their subscribers
on a broad scale through a leading search engine."
Separately, Yahoo! earlier this week acquired Dialpad Communications Inc., a consumer Internet telephony provider, and its addition of
syndication-feed pinging service blo.gs. The Dialpad grab positions it in direct competition with consumer VOIP leasers like Skype Technologies S.A. and America Online Inc.'s rival IM service, which
just announced plans to add VOIP features of its own.