YAHOO! LAUNCHES 'MY WEB'... DEFINITELY ON A ROLL

Kevin Akira Lee announced yesterday (well, a few hours ago) the launch of a new search service from Yahoo!

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. We're also experimenting with Attention.XML as a way to ship around My Web data. To try it out, go to any My Web RSS feed and replace the "rss.xml" filename with "attention.xml". As is often the case with brand new ideas, we haven't really figured out how exactly this should work, but there’s only one way to find out.

The old (but still useful) features from the original My Yahoo! Search product are still around… you can still use our optional search history (now conveniently available at the top of the search results page) to remember previous searches and block unwanted sites from search results. And there are some new additions, like the ability to import both IE and Yahoo! bookmarks (with support for other browsers forthcoming). Looking forward, we plan to keep building on My Web – letting users share links via the new Yahoo! 360 is just one example. (full post)