• by Gavin O'Malley  @mp_gavin, June 30, 2005

Harnessing the associative power of social networks, Yahoo! Wednesday introduced My Web 2.0, a new "social search engine," based on a page-ranking technology that organizes pages based on a user's search patterns and "the shared knowledge of the people they trust," Yahoo! said.

Rival company Google's system, "Page Rank," by contrast, is based on the frequency with which results are linked to by the Net collectively.

Building on folksonomies and tagging networks like del.icio.us and Flickr--which Yahoo! recently bought--My Web 2.0 makes Web pages popular among a network accessible to everyone within that network.

The product is available in a limited beta on a first come, first serve basis at myweb2.search.yahoo.com.

The service also lets users create a personal online archive by saving desired Web pages, search results, and a search history to "My Web."

Using the beta's "Save to My Web" button on the new Yahoo! toolbar, users can save an existing Web page to their personal archive, which can be retrieved at any time by searching "My Web." With the new sharing feature, users can also add notes to saved pages in order to personalize and organize the stored files. Users will be able to create files that are shared by a community; when updated by the user, everyone in the group will receive the update via RSS feed, said Tim Mayer, director of Yahoo! Search.

Yahoo! announced the beta release of an earlier version of the service, My Web 1.0, at the end of April--almost exactly one week after Google released a test service called "My Search History," which tracks users' searches when they are signed on to the service, and allows them to search those pages at a later date.

"My Web is the next step in integrating search and personal search with community by giving our users an easy way to have their own personal Web search experience--which incorporates what matters to them on the Internet--and allowing them to share that experience," said Mayer upon the initial release.

Yahoo! is offering an open API for the new application--which, enables developers to use Yahoo! data to create new products. "My Web" can also be accessed via the new beta version of the Yahoo! Toolbar.

Separately, Yahoo! today is expected to release an extension of its Search API offering with the availability of Yahoo! Maps API at developer.yahoo.net/maps/.