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