Yahoo! goes social

Yahoo! is beta testing a social web service for sharing bookmarks and trusted information.

At present this new feature is available on a first-come first-serve basis to a limited number of users.

Sharing bookmarks and searches

The new service is based on the My Web personal search service which has been enhanced to enable users to share their personal web index of pages and links.

My Web, which was launched in April, lets you share saved results via e-mail, syndication, and a public web page of saved search results.

You can choose which of your resources to available to other My Web 2.0 users and which to keep private.

You can also form or join groups or "communities" of My Web users with shared interests and shared resources, like friends or colleagues. In this way, people with common passions can generate a pool of hand-picked results in a specialized area.

Furthermore, My Web 2.0 allows tagging - a feature that lets you add descriptive keywords to your bookmarks. This way the bookmarks are easy to navigate even if you don't organize them in folders and subfolders.

Personalizing search results

My Web works by letting you save the content of all the pages you like and search this data to "re-find" your saved pages. Hence this database contains a lot of valuable data about your searching habits and your interest. Yahoo! will now use this data to generate highly targeted search results.

In their press release, Yahoo sates that "the overall aim of personal search services such as My Web 2.0 is to deliver page results that are more relevant than the ones users obtain by running queries against search engines' entire indexes, which typically contain billions of pages."

This is no doubt one motivation. You may search your bookmark collection, as well as the collections of your connected friends and colleagues to get highly targeted and "trusted" search results. Whether these search results actually will be more relevant than regular search results depends, of course, of the interests, knowledge and efforts of the people taking part in the network.

We would guess that Yahoo! at a later stage may use some of this information to refine its regular search engine results, i.e. the results you get by using the search engine found at yahoo.com. This is not the case at the moment, though.

Bookmarking

Another reason for Yahoo! implementing this new feature is the growing popularity of so called social bookmarking. Services for social bookmarking have been around for some time, like del.icio.us and de.lirio.us.

These services to not contain the group feature of My Web and this certainly does make Yahoo!'s new tool interesting.

It is too bad, though, that My Web 2.0 does not let you import bookmarks from services like del.icio.us.

More bookmark managers.
See also: Yahoo Integrates Personal & Social Search with MyWeb 2.0 (SEW)

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