When I was in college, our university library had access to over 650 digital
information sources, from broad-based sources such as the
Oxford English Dictionary and

InfoTrac to focused sources such as
Women and Social
Movements in the United States. Generally, these sources of knowledge
were built and maintained by other institutions or companies, and the
university would work with those companies to purchase a campus-wide
subscription to their digital knowledge. Everyone on campus found these
resources very useful, but eventually the librarians were faced with a
problem’each of these great digital knowledge sources was a standalone
product. If a student wanted to research a particular topic thoroughly,
she/he would have to sit down in front of several different computers and
perform several searches, each time using a different interface and searching
different texts.

We know that millions of you have subscriptions to very valuable information
sources that are password protected or otherwise inaccessible to Web search
engines. Some people refer to such content as part of the
deep Web. Since this content
isn’t in Web search engines, you have to visit each site individually and conduct
multiple searches to have a truly comprehensive search. We set out to address
this problem by partnering with several popular deep Web content providers
(Consumer Reports,

Forrester Research,
FT.com,
the IEEE,
the New England Journal of Medicine,
TheStreet.com, the
Wall Street Journal Online, the
ACM,
Factiva,
LexisNexis, and

Thomson Gale)
to build
Yahoo! Search Subscriptions.
Now it’s easy to include results from a number of popular subscription sites in
your everyday Web search experience. You still need a subscription to the sites
if you want to access their content, and since all Yahoo! users aren’t subscribed
to the same sites, you can select the sources you want to search by setting your personal
search subscriptions
preferences.

What we’re releasing today in the U.S. and the UK is only the beginning of
larger efforts to help you find more of the information that’s useful to you.
Just like everything else we do, Yahoo! Search Subscriptions will continue to
improve. We will expand the list of content sources globally (feel free to
suggest a
publication or if you are a publisher and would like to join this program
contact us).
So please give it a test drive and let us know what you
think. You
can get started at http://search.yahoo.com/subscriptions or
http://search.yahoo.co.uk/subscriptions.

John Riccardi
Product Manager
Yahoo! Search