Yahoo Launches MyWeb 2.0 Personalized Search
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Written By Reprise Media | June 29, 2005 | Share This
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Virtually in tandem with Google’s relaunch of personal search, yesterday Yahoo announced the release of their social search engine, MyWeb 2.0.
This second version takes the first one step further with features enabling community-based search and sharing of information. One of the most prominent new features is tagging, which lets users assign descriptive keywords to the pages they save, something Jeeves personal search added last April.
There’s also a new relevance algorithm that’s said to deliver results far different (and some say better) than what you’d get on a regular meta engine. It searches within your personal profile and those of your ‘trust network’ (i.e., family and friends who are also users) to respond to queries.
Media reaction has been mixed. Greg Linden says it fails to pass the ‘grandma test’ while Chris Sherman takes a more multi-sided view. Chris Anderson once said of such a system don’t assume I like the same stuff my friends do while Yahoo VP of Product Management Eckart Walther wants us to just give it a chance:
“[Yahoo] spent a lot of time fixing things that didn’t work…We can pretty much eliminate spam.”
Let’s hope they can, because there’s a real potential for problems here. Not enough to make me want to discount tagging altogether - in fact I’m a big fan. But it’s got to be natural, intuitive, and easy. So far I’ve yet to see a system that really offers it up in a form I want to use every day. Maybe I’m being too negative.
Then again, no one can beat John Dvorak’s column last May titled To Tag or Not to Tag, That is the Question for negativity:
“The utopianism and idealism that exist in the online societies ignore the real problem with tags, metatags, ubertags, folksonomies, and the like. This is because they honestly think that most people are goodhearted. The online world, because of its anonymity, encourages bad behavior. “You suck!” is a common post, and it would be the number-one tag if tagging ever became popular.”
Even if it’s a bit of an exaggeration, something that last line just makes me giggle.
Topics: Yahoo! |