WebProNews

A new service debuting late Wednesday night lets users search through various subscription services.

The beta version of Yahoo! Search Subscriptions went online recently. It allows users to search the content of various subscription-only web sites via a single search box.

Normally, search engines can't find content hidden away in password-protected news and reference sites. To access content once it has been found by the search, a user will still have to have a valid subscription.

Currently, the beta subscription search has seven sources listed:

• Consumer Reports
• FT.com (60 days)
• Forrester Research
• IEEE Publications
• New England Journal of Medicine
• TheStreet.com
• The Wall Street Journal (30 days)

Future sources include ACM, Factiva, and Lexis-Nexis. Users can search through all the sources, or select only one or several of them to sift through.

Yahoo hopes to enhance the user experience for subscribers to these services by making searches of their content part of a regular web search. A Yahoo user can save selected sources as part of their search preferences.

Results of a search that return subscription content along with regular web results will see the subscription results display above the others. A box titled Subscription Results for Yahoo with the items retrieved will be shown. Or, by visiting the Search Subscription page, users can focus on searching only through the subscription services.

Subscriptions to the various services must be purchased directly from them. Yahoo will not be selling subscriptions.

David Utter is a staff writer for WebProNews covering technology and business. Email him here.