Search Trends - Search Engine Marketing

Yahoo continues to rev its search engine with the announcement of the beta version of My Yahoo! Search (requires myYahoo login). Yahoo's personalized search lets you save web pages to the "My Web" section and block out the ones you don't want to see again. It also lets you add notes so you remember why you saved that particular page to "your web". You can also share web pages with friends and then go back and search through your saved search results.

Everyone's been talking about personalized search lately, but I think Yahoo will be the company to take the concept mainstream. They've got a huge userbase who are loyal and already have to login to check email and get their customized homepage in MyYahoo anyway, so it will be a smooth transition to get people to use the personalized search features. I'm sure we'll see a lot of changes and evolution in the way these personalized search tools work, but it seems to be moving ahead full speed.

I'm sure there are a lot of people out there who don't trust Yahoo enough to store their search information like this. I personally see a lot of value that can be derived from this type of personalized search. It will take a while before people fully understand how this works and get used to the added functionality. I don't think people are going to start saving web pages on every search result, but this can be a huge help for in-depth research projects. It makes it easier to pick up where you left off, rather than having to start over every day.