Tip 1: Fine-tune Yahoo Web search queriesTip 2: Personalise, track, and share the Web
Tip 3: Compare Yahoo and Google search results
Tip 2: Personalise, track, and share the Web
The Yahoo My Web 2 beta service gives you a powerful set of tools to collect Web pages, annotate them, and share them with others. In My Web, you can save links to your favourite Web sites (much like bookmarks) and organise them in custom folders. Yahoo's purchase of the social bookmark-sharing service del.icio.us indicates the company's continued interest in such features. But for now, there are several features available at My Web beyond collecting links.
Using My Web | Sharing My Web
- Site notes
You can add notes to any saved Web site in My Web. You can use these notes to provide a site description, personal comments about the site, or any other bits of text. - Copies of Web pages
Instead of saving just a link to a Web site, My Web saves a copy of a page as it looked when you added it to My Web. So even if a Web page changes between when you added the site to My Web and when you want to reference it later, you can be sure you'll see the original. - Search History
If you enable Search History, Yahoo will remember which sites you click in any Yahoo search results and save them to your My Web History folder. If you have trouble remembering what search term you used to find a particular site, this might be a useful feature for you. But if you'd prefer to keep your searches more private, make sure that in the My Web home page, Off is highlighted in red next to Search History. - Blocked sites
Some sites that show up in search results simply aren't relevant and won't be relevant to any search you make. Clicking Block tells Yahoo not to show that particular site in your future search results. Blocked sites show up in your My Web Blocked folder, so you can periodically review the sites you've blocked. - Shared folders
By default, folders with links and copied pages are private, but you can also choose to share any particular folder with the world. My Web also makes RSS feeds available for shared folders so that others can subscribe to them and keep up with your changes.
Yahoo My Web 2 enables you to further customise your Web finds by saving and sharing them with other users.
Once you've enabled My Web, you'll see some extra options as you search with Yahoo. Log in to Yahoo and browse to search.yahoo.com. The first change you'll notice is a My Web link under the Yahoo logo and the status of your Search History feature. Click Off or On at any time to enable or disable the Search History feature. Each search result on the page will also have two links: Save and Block. Clicking Save brings up a form on the page that will allow you to choose a folder to save the site in, and a text field for adding notes to the site.
Clicking Block notifies you that the site will be blocked from future searches. You can click Unblock Site to restore the site in the current search results, or you can visit your Blocked folder to put the site back into view on future searches.
If you want to take the features of My Web with you to other Web sites, you can use the Yahoo Toolbar. If you don't see the My Web button represented by a yellow folder on your toolbar, be sure you have the latest version of the toolbar. You can also choose Add/Edit Buttons from the toolbar settings button, check the box next to My Web under Personal Tools, and click the Finished button. Once the My Web button is installed, you should see it with its related pull-down menu.
If you want to save a particular Web page, click the yellow folder icon with the green plus (+) sign. The pop-up window lets you modify the saved title, add a note about the page, save it to a specific My Web folder, and store the actual contents of the page just as if you'd clicked the Save button next to a Yahoo Search result. Sharing My Web
As you browse through your saved sites at myweb.yahoo.com, you have the option to make folders full of sites public (they're private by default). Simply click the radio button next to Public in the My Web folder publishing options. Once your My Web folder is public, anyone will be able to view the sites you've saved to that folder in a number of ways. You can share the collection of Web pages in a My Web folder directly via a predictable URL. Public-folder URLs follow this pattern: http://myweb.search.yahoo.com/myweb/user/hashed account/folder name
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