In the esteemed pages of Online, Ben Hammersley claimed that Yahoo! was the new Google. Maybe that's why Yahoo! were so keen to tell me about their latest service. "We've definitely been launching a lot of new products," Salim Mitha, the director of Yahoo! Search UK and Ireland, said with a chuckle when I spoke to him yesterday about the company's latest innovation, MyWeb.
In effect, the MyWeb personal search matches Google's My Search History. It then ups the bells and whistles quota by allowing users to save what Mitha called an "electronic photocopy" of a web page rather than a link or cache version, which could change over time.
You can annotate the saved page with a note – something like "receipt for bargain flights to Spain", for example. Then, when you've forgotten which airport you're supposed to be flying from, you can search both the content of the saved pages and your annotations.
You can turn your favourite saved pages into a publicly-accessible linklog, publish it on your blog via RSS feeds, and email or IM the pages to friends. For more specifics on how the whole thing works, read PC's magazine's review. There's also more on Yahoo!'s search blog.
Mitha explained how MyWeb fits into Yahoo!'s wider strategy:
What we're really looking at is how to tie together the Yahoo! properties - the content on Yahoo!, the services on Yahoo!, and then how that brings the best of the web and the best of Yahoo! to the users. It's a fundamental change.
As with all launches these days, it's not quite a launch - a more basic version of MyWeb has been available (if not widely publicised) on Yahoo!'s early adopter site Next since October last year, and it's going into beta today.
But it is heartening to see a joint US-UK approach to the launch, rather than the usual approach of giving US customers a head start of several months on new innovations. And there's also an API (Online's Jack Schofield explains what APIs are and why they're important here).
Chris Sherman, of SearchEngineWatch, is impressed so far. Like Sherman, I like the idea of being able to save pages - a function I can see being particularly useful when working on a laptop or computer that isn't hooked up to a printer. But it'll take a bit more playing around with the various options before it's clear just how useful MyWeb will be.
MakeYouGoHmmm.com rounds up some of the response from bloggers.
