Yahoo said Thursday that the beta engine, called My Web, is designed for maintaining personal search archives and search history, and that users can use Yahoo blog tools to make pages public to other users.
My Web automatically remembers what keywords were previously searched for and provides a retrieval system for up to thousands of exact replicas of web pages, Yahoo said, and pages can be annotated with notes. Page categories also can be saved and then shared via email, IM or RSS, and bookmarks can be imported from Internet Explorer. My Web also can be accessed from anywhere, Yahoo said, not just the user's computer.
The advantage of the page capture functionality of the engine, Yahoo said, is that the information originally saved does not change, even if the web page is later updated. My Web also works with a toolbar.
The beta version is available to developers and organizations looking to create their own search services, the web portal said.
Users of My Web also will be able to share data with the Yahoo 360 network, which allows users to share music and pictures in a social networking platform.
Analysts are predicting that the impetus behind Yahoo's launch of My Web is to rival a similar search project launched by Google recently called My Search History. The new tool also puts Yahoo in more direct competition with Ask Jeeves and MSN.
Neck-and-neck in many of their business offerings, Yahoo and Google have lately both enjoyed unprecedented growth, mainly due to mutually successful targeted search engine advertising businesses.
Financial stats for Google point to a substantial surge in its first quarter profits and Yahoo nearly doubled its profits for the same quarter.