Yahoo My Web Personalized Search Experience
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). The announcement was made on the YSearchBlog this evening by Kevin Akira Lee, Senior Product Manager of Yahoo! Search.
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.
Oh, did I mention, this is BIG? Just look at what Yahoo has done with integration of search advertising sponsored links into the Yahoo network. Add behavioral and “post search” targeting into the mix and you have a somewhat new breed of search advertising.
