by Head of Search
Andrew Girdwood
Yahoo!, owners of the popular del.icio.us social bookmark engine, have upgraded MyWeb. At MyWeb Yahoo! users can tag and save their favourite web sites. These online bookmarks can then be shared with contacts and friends. Andrew Girdwood
Yahoo! have made it easy for users to identify others with similar interests. The new look MyWeb allows users to explore a tag - a keyword description for a bookmarked website - and see who else has been actively applying the same tag to web sites. The news tag, for example, reveals five active users on the left hand side of the screen and some publicly 'news' tagged sites on the right.
Social sites like MySpace, LiveJournal and Bebo have seen phenomenal growth in 2006 as internet users become increasingly willing to spend a good percentage of their social time online. By tapping into the social search vein Yahoo! hopes to give their search engine a competitive edge over Google. Yahoo! users can choose not to keyword search the entire internet but instead restrict their search just to pages that people or peers have previously bookmarked. As it is at Bigmouth, media is all important for these early adopters and simply by virtue of being online many of these social search tagging behaviours are being seen as fun, rather than simply indexing.
Yahoo! have also added the "Interesting Today" tab to the MyWeb interface through which users can see which tags and sites are currently popular. The feature is reminiscent of Yahoo!'s Buzz Index which presents a gossip column style analysis of popular keyword trends.
