This is a genuinely new approach to search. Yahoo sees it as complementing the regular kind of Web search performed with search engines, not replacing it. Though in some ways, it will allow whole communities of users to, in effect, create their own search engines. In its search blog, Yahoo states that “Over time, we envision communities using My Web to build their own search engines to capture and make accessible the knowledge of their community – search engines populated with the collective experience of a group of medical researchers, a community of PHP experts, a bird watching club, or members of a structural engineering consulting firm.”
Interestingly, Google apparently hasn’t thought of this yet – at least, as of this writing, there aren’t even any rumors that Google is working on something like this. It’s a very rare thing to catch the search engine giant flat-footed. Whether this will be enough to give Yahoo an edge remains to be seen.
The community aspect of My Web 2.0 could potentially give Yahoo’s site far more “stickiness” than it has had before. Users of My Web 2.0 need to be registered with Yahoo, of course; they can’t receive the benefits of My Web 2.0 unless they are signed in. Once they are signed in, they will see that My Web 2.0 fits in perfectly with Yahoo’s whole strategy of keeping people connected with each other (as with Yahoo 360, email, instant messaging, contacts, and many other features).
This is not the first time I’ve observed that Yahoo takes a very different approach to search from Google. For Yahoo, it seems that search is a means to an end – getting people connected with, well, whatever they need to be connected with, be it people or information. Google at least gives the impression that it considers search to be more of an end in itself. We’ll see which approach will win in the long run.
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