Yahoo Adds Sharing To Personalized Search

Yahoo Inc. has released in beta an upgrade of its personalized search service that focuses on delivering more relevant results through online communities of people with similar interests.

Yahoo, based in Sunnyvale, Calif., is taking a far different approach to personalized search than rival Google Inc., which focuses on delivering better results to people based on their search histories.

Yahoo's My Web 2.0, launched late Wednesday, lets people tag their search results and then save them for immediate access later. Users can tag the saved pages with descriptive keywords, which are also useful to other people who may be looking for information on a similar topic.

Yahoo hopes that people will build their own repository of search results, and then use My Web to build networks of friends, families and colleagues, who can share results, or browse each other's for information. Pages must be placed in a "shared folder" in order to be accessible to others.

To build networks, My Web provides tools for sending invitations to people.