I'm happy to announce the release of searchbeta.active.com!  We've been working for many months to improve upon our "Alpha" and today we're ready to open the new Search to you.  Keep in mind it's still in beta and there are a few kinks.  We're hoping to gather a lot of user feedback so that, when it comes time to replace search.active.com, we've built a product that you will love to use.  Check out this screencast for details:

We now have over 100 users in our Search Beta, and the feedback we've received so far has been positive. One user has asked:

"I would love to see something interactive where I could quickly access different multimedia from past events. It wouldn't necessarily be official race photos (I'd actually prefer that they weren't) but even links to a search results page for the event's name in Flickr or YouTube would be great. Even a search OUTSIDE the active network, bringing me to different bloggers who have posted about the events or written race reports from past events would be great to see."

I couldn't agree more.  There's a ton of interesting, relevant content out there in the cloud that would add value to search.  We're working now to implement this feature, pulling in photos from flickr, videos from youtube, tweets from twitter and blog posts from technorati (a blog search engine).

Sign up for access to our Search Beta at http://labs.active.com/users/new using the invite code "blogsearchinvite".

update: we've just rolled out integration to Twitter, Flickr and Youtube!