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The Web portal wants to include pages usually inaccessible to search engines

Yahoo on Tuesday will begin a systematic effort to draw more content into its searchable database of Web documents, in its latest bid to win Web surfers from search rival Google.

The Web portal said that it will introduce a "content aggregation program" (CAP) designed to index the billions of documents contained in public databases but that are commonly inaccessible to search engines, or what's called the invisible or deep Web. To this end, it has aligned with the Library of Congress, UCLA, National Public Radio, the University of Michigan and Project Gutenberg, among others, to begin seeding its index with fresh, searchable material for Web surfers' queries.

"We aim to extend the way we discover content for free," said Tim Cadogan, Yahoo's vice president of search. "One of the challenges is that the interaction between content providers and search engines is lacking. So we said, let's reach out to the public domains and nonprofits, and try to get more of that content exposed."

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