Yahoo! MyWeb 2.0 Beta

The slightly bewilderingly name Yahoo! MyWeb 2.0 marks and attempt by Yahoo! to clawl some credibility back to its search offerings. It consists of a few features, most of which can already be found elsewhere:

Saving search history -

• As seen at: A9 and Google.
• Implementation: nothing special, the switch to turn it off isn’t that obvious.
• Usefulness: definately better than bookmarks. But then again if I want to refind a website I can usually pick out which keywords will get it with a Google ‘I’m feeling lucky’ straight from Firefox.

Tagging pages -

• As seen at: del.icio.us.
• Implementation: poor. No fancy AJAX, just an unenticing form asking for too much meta-data. In a popup, no less…
• Usefulness: low. How many places can I be bothered to tag things at?

Caching a snapshot of the pages you save -

• As seen at: Furl.
• Implementation: reasonable.
• Usefulness: I’ve never needed to use this with Furl. Usually, if I need to see a webpage that’s since been updated or deleted, it’s after-the-fact and I’m unlikely to have saved it. The Wayback Machine normally takes care of it.

Sharing pages/tags with ‘contacts’ -

• As seen at: Can’t think of anywhere using this specific idea, but it’s not far from what Flickr, 43 Things and del.icio.us are doing.
• Implementation: ok. Browsing your contacts’ tags is easy enough. Adding contacts less so (’invite by e-mail’ - how old school is that?).
• Usefulness: depends. Browsing tagged webpages seems less immedietly gratifying that tagged photos or places.

Searching ‘My Web’ -

• As seen at: Google (where it’s quite new).
• Implementation: poor. The default is to search only the pages you’ve directly saved, which is a waste of time when you’ve only saved a few pages (and it only searches the page, not the whole site that page belongs to). It’s also an either-or option (the whole web or ‘My Web’), where Google combines the two, allowing your search history to influence the results, but not totally relying on it.
• Usefulness: poor. You may as well return to bookmarks. ‘Saving’ pages takes too much effort, when it should be automatically saving the pages you click through too from the main search results.

Verdict: Interesting, but not enough to lure me away from Google. Will it get the user base to be able to overtake del.icio.us I wonder?

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