Alright. We don’t usually post about Yahoo! here, because aside from the fact that you always have to put an otherwise sentence-ending exclamation point in the middle of a sentence every time you mention it, Word® assumes it actually is the end and makes the next word capitalized, which makes you annoyed. That, and it’s a big one, and we’re out for the little guys. However, Yahoo! is now fiddling with something called OpenSearch on its beta, Alpha, Greek pun unintended.

Back to OpenSearch in a second, Alpha describes itself as federated search. No, this does not have to do with the Constitution or Ben Bernanke or anything, but rather the user adding personalized sources to the search. With a Yahoo! account, you can add what you want, and take out what you don’t. In general, Alpha will pull YouTube, Wikipedia, news, and Yahoo! answers for you on whatever you’re searching for and put it on the right.

As for OpenSearch, this is a format that allows Alpha to take results from any site that chooses to syndicate its search results, creating a web-like crawly goopy loosely confederated searchy thing, sort of like the Holy Roman Empire or the German Bund for you history buffs familiar with loose confederacies. This means that any site that pays Yahoo! for a search tool gets special attention in Alpha’s results.

The “Add to Alpha” feature that you can find here. at the top of the page, adds shopping to your customised search profile. Also new is the Send2Mobile feature, which sends advertiser details to your mobile. SMS is completely free to users.

For a review of Alpha, check this out.