Ajax is a favorite with some of the big names in the world of web and keeping in sync with it Yahoo! has been testing Yahoo! Alpha which is a new Ajax based searching service. It is still in the beta stage and has been hosted on Yahoo's Australian domain. You can access third party services in a default layout which includes YouTube, Google and Wikipedia. You can also perform Flickr, Wikipedia and YouTube queries besides Yahoo. This meta search engine gives a bit of feel of Netvibes though.

The search engine can be customized as per your requirement and you can add, remove or rearrange components. Just fire a query and you can get results for Wikipedia. Yahoo Answers, Flickr, YouTube and of course Yahoo. It is still not known as to when Yahoo! Alpha will move out of beta into the final stage. It looks as if Yahoo is all set to inch closer to Google in the search engine war, courtesy Ajax.