My Yahoo! Search

With all the noise today about Microsoft’s new search engine, I thought this might be an opportune time to share something neat I just stumbled across — Yahoo’s next-generation beta search interface.

It’s pretty cool. You can do the standard search stuff, but if you log in with your Yahoo account, it lets you do a bunch of other stuff as well — stuff like saving pages that you like from your results to a “My Web” storage area for easy reference, blocking pages that aren’t relevant from search results, making it easy to share interesting sites with friends by e-mail, and more. You can even use the My Web function much like the way people use del.icio.us, as a kind of public linkblog — it even publishes an RSS feed for your My Web content.

Of course, the key question is how good the search results are; I haven’t played with it enough to be able to say definitively if it is Good Enough yet. But if it is, this could definitely give Google something to stay up nights worrying about — it’s the first real innovation I’ve seen applied to the search experience since, well, the launch of Google.


Comments

Some Guy

November 14, 2004
2:56 am

Jason,
I happened across this post and checked it out – looks pretty cool. But, I figured I’d never actually use it unless.. well.. unless I could set it up in my Mozilla search bar. So I did.
I’ve submitted it to mycroft, but if you’re impatient you can give it a try at http://www.rit.edu/~jhp5571/myyahoo.zip (paste both files to the searchplugins folder).
You’ll definitely never be able to figure out who wrote this. No sirree. Especially not if you look at the source of the file. *cough*

Jason Lefkowitz

November 14, 2004
9:45 pm

Hey Justin 🙂 How’s school going?
Great plugin! I dropped it into my Firefox 1.0 installation and it works great. All you need now is the little Javascript to auto-install it and the package will be complete…