Yahoo, the second largest search portal, opened the beta version of Alpha's meta-search system, collecting search results not only from Yahoo, but also from Flickr, Yahoo! 7 Answers, Yahoo! 7 News, YouTube and Wikipedia. Search results from all the listed sources can be shown or hidden by a mouse click, and registered Yahoo users can choose the sources they need, or even add their own, if they support the OpenSearch initiative.
According to Yahoo Search Engineer 7 Brett Pulley (Brett Poole), “Alpha was born from pizza and fierce programming” during the annual “Hack Day” held by Yahoo. Yahoo7 is a joint venture between Yahoo and Seven Network, Australia’s largest commercial television network and major Australian magazine publisher, ITWire reported.