Google is to Scholar: AS Yahoo is to ?

Yahoo--or as they say Yahoo!--has stepped up its competition with Google by offering what they are calling Yahoo search -- subscription. It's in--you guessed it--beta.

They offer federated searching across several subscription databases. Looks like they are focusing on business resources (as opposed to academic.) Right now they have: ConsumerReports.org, IEEE, Forrester Research, the Wall Street Journal Online, the New England Journal of Medicine, TheStreet.com, and the Financial Times. Within a few weeks they plan to add other vendors like Factiva, LexisNexis, Thomson Gale Group, and ACM (Association for Computing Machinery).

You still only get citations that link to the publisher's website but it's more sophisticated than GoogleScholar. They:

• let you choose what databases you want to search (this is possible with just a few dabase)
• indicate that they don't necessarily carry complete contents of some titles (e.g., WSJ includes only the last 30 days)
• have waaay more options for advanced searching (although you don't see the option until you get to the first set of hits)
  
• let you set preferences if you login as a Yahoo account holder.

I'll be interested to see how Lexis/Nexis handles links to citations. They are pretty primitive in how they work with OpenURLs. Right now a link from an SFX menu to full text in L/N takes you to the basic search for the whole dbase. arghhh!

Yahoo FAQ explains the service.
Story about it at InfoToday's Newsbreak .