Yahoo! tests personal search

Yahoo! adds bookmarks, bookmark notes and a new browser button.

(October 5 2005) Yahoo! has launched a beta test version of its new My Yahoo! Search feature.

If you are registered as a Yahoo! user (included in the free mail account), you may save the results you find interesting, block search results you do not want to see again and share your findings with others.

You may also search the web pages found in your saved search results. In practice Yahoo! will add the following links below each search listing: Save - Save with Note - Share - Block Site . Clicking on Save with Note will open a form within the search engine result page, letting you add your own comment.

You can also save pages in My Yahoo! that has not been found by using the search engine.

There is a separate browser button (for IE Explorer, Firefox, Mozilla/Netscape and Safari) that can be added to the browser toolbar. Pushing this button let's you save the present web page and add a comment to the new "bookmark".

Clicking on My Web link brings up a site presenting all saved pages, search engine results as well as pages found while browsing. You may then sort these bookmarks by categories. You decide what to call the categories.

All in all we find this service promising, indeed. Some of us use several computers and a large number of different browsers, which makes it hard to keep a consistent collection of bookmarks. By gathering all bookmarks in My Yahoo!, they will be available on any internet connected computer in the world.

If this all sounds familiar, that is because Yahoo! is following in the footsteps of Ask Jeeves and A9 . Looksmart recently bought the Furl.net online bookmark service for the same reason.

They all plan to make us loyal customers of their site and their search engine, increasing the profits generated by pay-per-click text ads. If that means bringing out new useful innovations, we will not complain.

Yahoo! on the new service.

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