Yahoo focuses on subscription content

Internet portal Yahoo has released a beta of a search engine for premium subscription content, providing users with the ability to search for content within Factiva, LexisNexis and Thomson Gale.

Yahoo Search Subscriptions provides a free search of premium content databases from the Wall Street Journal online, TheStreet.com stock market reports service, The New England Journal of Medicine, Forrester Research technology analysis, the Financial Times, and engineering information from the IEEE.

Yahoo said in a statement that Factiva, LexisNexis AlaCarte, Thomson Gale and content from the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) will be added to the service.

Users of Yahoo Search Subscriptions have to manually select which subscription databases they want to search.

Unlike internet search rival Google, Yahoo has concentrated on news services rather than connecting to academic content, which Google Scholar searches for.