Pandia Post No. 26 Part 1

Personalization: Google's Search History vs. Yahoo's MyWeb

By Lars Våge, InternetBrus

Google recently launched its personal search feature Search History. Yahoo!, possibly its hardest competitor, replied by launching a similar service called MyWeb.

It should be noted that MyWeb has been available for more than half a year; however, this test version of the service has been hidden away in the deep recesses of the Yahoo! site. Now there is a link to it on the Yahoo! Search start page.

Both services ask you to register as a user, making it possible for you to save your search history on their servers, making these data available from any computer anywhere in the world.

With Google’s Search History you can find out what you searched for on a particular day and the relevant click throughs. Moreover, you can search the content of the pages you have visited earlier. And that’s about it.

However, Google’s Search History does not have the same functionality as MyWeb.

Yahoo’s MyWeb will add special links to the search engine result pages, allowing you to save good results, and exclude web pages you find uninteresting from future searches.

If you click on Save you will be presented with a dialog box where you can select a folder for safekeeping and add a comment regarding the content of the particular page. If you do not have a folder for this use, you can make one.

Having done this, the webpage in question will get a special information box in future search results – containing your comment.

You can, of course, look through your selection of saved webpages anytime. Yahoo! will save cached copies of these web pages in your folder, i.e. copies of the page as it looked at the time you saved this information. This is useful for pages that change often, or that are likely to be removed by the web site owner.

MyWeb also lets you retrace your previous searches in order to find specific listings, and you can search the content of all saved pages. Moreover, you can save search results in a separate folder that can be made available to other users. These results will be published as a blog with links and a related RSS feed.

Both MyWeb and Google’s Search History requires a (free) account. These accounts can be used for other services provided as well (mail, news etc.). Ask Jeeves and A9 provides similar services.

Go to page 2: New search engine: Seekport