Yahoo Adds Personal Search Feature

Quickly following on the heels of Google's (Nasdaq: GOOG) My Search History, Yahoo (Nasdaq: YHOO) today released My Web, a feature that lets users create a personalized record of online Web search information.

The beta version of My Web is available for download on the Yahoo site or through its toolbar.

More Options

My Web saves a copy of the page as well as the link to that page. Users can add notes to the saves pages, do complete text searches of their saved material, send saved pages to others on the Web or access their search history to find previous results.

They can also create Web sites with their favorite saved pages or share their pages using an RSS feed.

The new service is an outgrowth of tools Yahoo released in October. The company said the new functionality comes from suggestions and requests from early adopters of those tools. But in the race to create the next best service, search engines may be overloading their users.

Crowded Space

"Man, the pace of announcements is starting to feel overwhelming in the search space," John Battelle, co-founder of Wired and publisher of The Industry Standard, among other achievements, wrote in Searchblog.

"We're certainly in something of an arms race now, with Google and Yahoo the main perpetrators, and MSN playing catch up to boot. Is this good for the consumer of search and Internet services? Surely in the long term, but I worry that the relentless stream of new features and services will start to deaden interest in the space," he wrote.

Yahoo will offer the new services as an open application program interface (API) so that developers can use Yahoo data to create new products.

Yahoo said that it plans to integrate the folders within each user's search history with its other tools, such as e-mail, instant messenger and its personal networking service.

"My Web is the next step in our vision of integrating search, personal search and community by providing users an easy way to have their own personal Web search experience that incorporates the best of the Web and what matters most to them," Qi Lu, vice president of engineering for Yahoo Search, said in a statement.