Yahoo My Web Energizes Personalized Search
Yahoo announced that they are taking My Yahoo Search (or personal search) to the 360th degree today with the launch of Yahoo ‘My Web’ – a beefed up personalized web offering which offers RSS syndication, saved search, and integration into the normal Yahoo Search and Toolbar offerings (this is BIG). My Web is a “personal search engine” that extends users’ existing Yahoo! Search experience by providing a simple way to save, recall and share online information with friends and colleagues. My Web enables users to create their own personal online archive by saving their favorite pages, search results, and search history to My Web.
“Yahoo! Search is focused on providing innovative, useful technologies that enable people to find, use, share, and expand knowledge,” said Dr. Qi Lu, vice president of engineering for Yahoo! Search. “My Web is the next step in our vision of integrating search, personal search and community by providing users an easy way to have their own personal web search experience that incorporates the best of the Web and what matters most to them.”
Yahoo Search reports : Today, we launched a ‘My Web’, a new personal search engine fully integrated with Yahoo! Search. My Web is based on a very simple principle – a search engine should enable you to define and use the information that’s important to you. Specifically, My Web enables you to find the information relevant to you, save it, share it, add your own notes to it, and easily find it again, whether it’s three days or three months later.
The idea is a simple one; we provide a ‘Save’ button on our search results, on the Yahoo! Toolbar (for both IE and Firefox), and, in the future, anywhere you might find useful info on the Web. When you hit the ‘Save’ button, My Web grabs that page and makes a cached copy which is fully searchable. Anytime you need that page, all you need to do is search My Web. You can publish your My Web links via RSS and, of course, there’s an API for My Web published on YSDN.
By the way, there is no direct link to Yahoo ‘My Web’. Why? Like I said (and this is BIG) it is directly integrated into Yahoo Search! What was that Google personalized search thing that everyone was talking about a couple of days ago? I forgot… Maybe I’ll check Yahoo My Web and try to remember.
The main difference between Yahoo and Google’s personalized searches is that more Yahoo users are ‘logged in’ as they search and Google still has some space ahead of them when it comes to securing more registered users. Basically, Yahoo Search is able to deliver a valuable personal search experience to users by leveraging direct relationships with nearly 176 million active registered users per month. Yahoo users are more apt to be logged in due to the popularity of Yahoo’s Fantasy Sports, Yahoo Messenger, Yahoo Mail and other long term Yahoo offerings.
