Saving, Sharing, and Syndicating Search via My Web
Back in October 2004, I blogged about a personal search product we called My Yahoo! Search. At the time, I wrote ‘our vision is of a very individual Web ‘ a ‘My Web’, if you will.’
Today, we launched a ‘My Web’, a new personal search engine fully integrated with Yahoo! Search. My Web is based on a very simple principle – a search engine should enable you to define and use the information that’s important to you. Specifically, My Web enables you to find the information relevant to you, save it, share it, add your own notes to it, and easily find it again, whether it’s three days or three months later.
The idea is a simple one ‘ we provide a ‘Save’ button on our search results, on the Yahoo! Toolbar (for both IE and Firefox), and, in the future, anywhere you might find useful info on the Web. When you hit the ‘Save’ button, My Web grabs that page and makes a cached copy which is fully searchable. Anytime you need that page, all you need to do is search My Web.
You can publish your My Web links via RSS and, of course, there’s an API for My Web published on YSDN. We’re also experimenting with Attention.XML as a way to ship around My Web data. To try it out, go to any My Web RSS feed and replace the “rss.xml” filename with “attention.xml”. As is often the case with brand new ideas, we haven’t really figured out how exactly this should work, but there’s only one way to find out.
The old (but still useful) features from the original My Yahoo! Search product are still around’ you can still use our optional search history (now conveniently available at the top of the search results page) to remember previous searches and block unwanted sites from search results. And there are some new additions, like the ability to import both IE and Yahoo! bookmarks (with support for other browsers forthcoming). Looking forward, we plan to keep building on My Web ‘ letting users share links via the new Yahoo! 360 is just one example.
But enough talk. Go to http://search.yahoo.com and try it for yourself and let us know what you think.
Kevin Akira Lee
Senior Product Manager
Yahoo! Search
Kevin, this is great. One request please. Can we get a bookmarklet that will enable us to save the entire page, not just a link as the current bookmarklet does?
Kevin, this is the bookmarklet I am referring to. Thanks.
http://help.yahoo.com/help/us/ysearch/myweb/myweb-22.html
Steve – thanks for the suggestion. (Only out for an hour, and already getting good feedback…) We’ll start investigating this.
Kevin – love this product. LOVE IT! Congrats on getting it out.
Cool stuff, but I’m curious. Why no RSS feed of the saved pages view?
I was sure yahoo would somthing more powerful than del.ici.ous And Yeh it would find a good place in Y!360. it’s a very neat tool, thanks again !!
By the way did you guys change the bookmark Button in the new Yahoo toolbar.it seems now we have to hold the click to see the list of bookmarks going down…a bit like in the Firefox toolbar but in Internet Explorer, mouse scrolling does not work
This is a great feature, Yahoo!, thank you. I’d like to see it merged with Yahoo! Bookmarks, mainly so I’d only need one button on my toolbar.
I wonder if technology like this is going to be a thorn in the side of groups like the Associated Press, which allows some content to only be live for a given period of time. The ability to cache content keeps open the ability to share it.
You say that it’s now possible to import Yahoo! Bookmarks, but I when I go to the “import bookmarks” link, I don’t see this possibility.
I would really like to import my Yahoo! Bookmarks to My Web.
Also, even if it’s often more useful tu search My Web than to search in all the visited search results, I think it would be a great idea to be able to search all the visited results (I would like to be able to do so, from the “history” page).
It is possible to import bookmarks. When you click to import bookmarks button, it automatically saves all the bookmarks of your browser(it happened atleast in my firefox). You won’t see any change. But now bookmark button on clicking will show all your bookmarks.
It doesn’t work for me to import my Yahoo! Bookmarks to My Web (maybe because I don’t have a US Yahoo! ID), but anyway I solved the problem exporting my Yahoo! Bookmarks to Internet Explorer and then importing the IE bookmarks to My Web.
My Web has great features, it’s very useful, I like it a lot.
I would love to be able to have a page that looks like search.yahoo.com but with a personal search engine.The “Images”, “News”, “Video” search links options would be replaced by the Categories I have created in My web. Also Just like I can add Y! Search to my website ,I would be able to add this personal searh engine as well
You CopyCat…You Google CopyCat…
I’ve got a service that does this and more for over a year now. For example, you can add attachments to a “bookmark” that can be syndicated as an enclosure.
You can splice feeds too and a bunch of stuff.
Guess I don’t have the marketing power… :)
>>>>”You CopyCat…You Google CopyCat…”
Does Google lemme organize my searches?
Does Google turn searches into Bookmarks?
Does Google lemme add RSS of my searches?
Does Google control Public and Private past searches?
Does Google let me save a copy of the page?
Did Google implement their Search archive in their toolbar?
Oh But simply, who started?:
http://www.ysearchblog.com/archives/000032.html
This is great and thanks for adding Mac OS X toolbar support into Firefox. Sweet.
Please don’t use the autocheck for the “save” mode…takes longer to save the link in our history when saving the page and you’ll gain storage space on your server if you disable it by default (or at least give us the option to !
Please don’t use the autocheck for the “save” mode…takes longer to save the link in our history when saving the page and you’ll gain storage space on your server if you disable it by default (or at least give us the option to !
I created a folder for online programming tutorials and mistakenly titled it “programming”. I went to the rename feature to put a capital P but an error showed up telling me a folder with that name already exists…so had to change for something else like “whatever”, and then re rename it again Programming.
I am using Mobile Firefox Candidate1 Beta. Is there a possiblitity toolbar that extentions for this version of FF ?
Btw, this is darn kewl .. kudos to the team !!
Kevin,
overall test of MyWeb shows it’s easy to use and easy to understand how it works. However, I’m dubious on the sharing options you’ve added (and plan to add with the Y!360 integration).
Sharing searches might be a plus when you work with several people on a project, so that the references can be used by all members of the project. But as for publishing it in a RSS feed, or integrating it on a Blog service for mainstream internet users, I don’t see your point at all.
What will this add to the user’s blog ? I mean, do we want that blogs become just links lists ? Links are useful when annotated & commented. If they’re just dumped into a repository, it’s no added value.
I’ve posted a more thorough comment on my blog. I’ve provided a translation link in case you don’t understand French ;-)
What’s the good community?
At first I went to!
http://messages.yahoo.com/?action=l&mid=&sid=96948201&tid=myweb&...
then someone from Yahoo posted a message to the new community on next.yahoo.com:
http://messages.next.yahoo.com/next/forumview?bn=MyWeb
but then no one participate…What’s the deal here????
Thanks for all of the suggestions and bug reports – we’re working on fixes and enhancements, so this is really helpful.
Samuel D – Regarding the sharing and RSS features, we think there’s a lot of value in providing multiple convenient ways of quickly sending URLs around. It’s not a replacement for blogs, it’s a nifty alternative way of telling other people about interesting web pages. The goal is not to limit how data should be shared – the goal is to give more options to people, so they can figure out how they want to use it.
Guillaume – the “correct” message board is the one linked to from the My Web page: http://messages.yahoo.com/bbs?action=l&tid=myweb&sid=96948201&mid=100000. We’ll be merging the two boards shortly. Sorry for the confusion.
Thanks Kevin I was confused lol
So it’s like Furl.net… but a year later?
I use Save to My Web with Firefox I think its a great service.
Firefox is supported, that did surprised me!
I like the fact I can save pages as I surf the web.
I’ve added My Bookmarks to My Web , I can feel secure if my Hard Drive goes down, my data is stored on My Web.
I like the ease of use but I’m disappointed there is no toolbar for Opera.
Was there a reason for not supporting Opera?
A tabbed interface would be nice as all the options are spread all over the place
The setting up of Shared folders is not as simple as it should be.
RSS is new to a lot of people your FAQ assumes people know how to set up an RSS feed , but that’s not so, Is there a better way to explain how to set up RSS?
Perhaps some kind of one click access?
It would be nice to have the option to change the colors on Save to My Web.
One concern how private and secure is my data?
I would like to see the My Web site in SSL, this is important in these days of wireless connections
Greetings
Colin
hi,
I am an compsci engg student from bangalore. I want to learn RSS techniques and take up some projects on it. How should I go about it?
regards,
Anush
Great stuff but I REALLY would like to see it extended so that you can add items to the public folders after a user has (voluntarily) been authenticated. That would open up a TON of powerful apps.
Thanks
I have had MyWeb introduced to my machine as an infection from an attachment to an email from a friend.
I now have My Web Search in my registry and I want it out – I have tried destroying it with Spy Bot – but it seems to be protected – PLEASE LET ME KNOW HOW i CAN REMOVE THIS TOTALLY UNWANTED PROGRAMME FROM MY COMPUTER.
This does not seem a responsible way for Yahoo to behave !!!!!
I have to click the “My Web” button. Then, the “Save to My Web” link. Then, “Ok”. Is there a way that I can do the above with only one click?
I agree with Colin. We need Opera support in the ways and means of a Toolbar. For those that agree, check out; http://my.opera.com/toolbars/about/
If I can do all of the above with just 1 click it would be nice.
don’t quite understand about API, can someone please explain
Like this cool feature.
Cool addition of Mac OS X toolbar support into Firefox
I use firefox too, but mainly i use Opera. It would be sweet to have a yahoo widget toolbar for Opera 9 just like the one in Firefox.