MUMBAI: Yahoo! Search has released My Web 2.0, which is a "personal and social search engine," in India.My Web 2.0 provides users a simple way to save, organise and tag actual web pages and bookmarks, recall them from any computer, as well as selectively share their personalised 'My Web' with friends and a broader community of users with similar interests.
My Web content from a user's own personal archive, as well as from a user's community are also displayed in the typical web search results page, further complementing results from Yahoo!'s leading web search engine.
Additionally, unlike bookmarks, a user's "My Web" is accessible from any computer, with no risk of losing saved bookmarks.
Yahoo! India managing director George Zacharias said, "Yet another example of Yahoo!'s innovative approach; My Web 2.0, dramatically improves the relevance of search results. The internet is becoming more community-orientated and users want access to trusted information. We see social search as the next phase of web search. My Web helps users tap into the power of communities, using tagging and sharing to improve their search experience. My Web 2.0 combine's social search with the power of web search to provide the user with more relevant results".
When users sign up to My Web and run a search, they see results at the top of the page derived from content that they saved in My Web and interesting links that other people have saved as a complement to the normal web search results, providing an even more relevant search experience.
My Web 2.0 provides significant feature enhancements to the earlier My Web product based directly on user feedback and include:
Tagging: categorize saved pages in a much more flexible way than using folders by assigning them to multiple categories labeling the content with tags.
Unidirectional connections: allows people to easily access valuable content that has been discovered by others, without having to have a personal relationship. This means that people can discover interesting pages of a specific user (it may be an industry expert, a celebrity, or your next door neighbor who knows something about everything and saves really useful links) and because you like what they are saving, you can subscribe to all of their pages. You can automatically add them as a contact and make them part of your community.
Additional Sharing controls: My Web 2.0 offers increased control over who you are sharing with - you can choose to be the only person who can access the pages saved, you can identify the communities you share certain saved pages with (friends, family etc) or you can share your saved pages with the world.
Enhanced Profile personalization: allows people to create a unique online identity, by assigning a photo or avatar, nickname and email address to their online identity, creating a more personal presence within the community. Over time, by personalising your presence, you could become a well-known web guru for the information you are saving and sharing.
Easy import of web pages: users can import easily their bookmarks, and also save pages with one click directly with the Yahoo! Toolbar.
