The recent upgrade to Yahoo!'s My Web is a whopper; the Yahoo! Search blog calls it "social search." Appropriating tagging in a big way, this product is like del.icio.us attached to one of the world's most powerful search engines. Yahoo! has woven tagging deeply into the search experience, the intent of which is to provide collaborative filtering of Web-search results. In Yahoo! My Web 2.0, you can limit a Yahoo! Search to Web pages saved and tagged by your community of friends, or to the entire universe of My Web 2.0 users. Alternately, you can search the Web in normal fashion, observe Web 2.0 suggestions atop the results page, and save/tag pages you like. Helpfully, Yahoo! has kept previous My Web functions intact, automatically tagging sites saved in folders with the titles of those folders.

My Web 2.0 is integrated with Yahoo! 360 to the extent of creating a My Web 2.0 community by default from the Yahoo! 360 friends list. Nothing in Yahoo! 360 indicates the presence of My Web 2.0. But having a built-in circle of friends helps get My Web 2.0 off to a flying start for 360 members; in my case, at least, there's a modest bdy of saved and tagged pages to browse through. Yahoo! provides tag maps restricted to the friends list, or opened to include all users. Likewise, you can save pages to be shared with only friends, or with everyone (or nobody).

Some bugs exist in this beta rollout; the My Web 2.0 blog acknowledges them. (Most aggravatingly, the Invite system doesn't seem to work.) But that's not important for now. the power of Yahoo! searching hooked up with saving/tagging is undeniable. This thing should grow into something special. Going forward, I suggest as top priority a browser button (as with del.icio.us) that saves/tags sites to My Web 2.0—we should be able to throw pages into our tagged collection no matter how we stumble across those pages. [A comment below notes that the Yahoo! Toolbar does include that button.]