Via Many2Many, I learn that Yahoo has a new gift for us: My Web 2.0 BETA – A Social Search Engine.
On Yahoo! Search Blog there is an introduction to the new service:
Almost two years ago, one of our engineers was interested in buying a plasma TV and tried using web search to find a good site for reviews — a quick search revealed that there were hundreds of sites offering to educate him on plasma TVs, yet short of visiting all the sites, it was difficult to figure out which site exactly was the ‘best’ site. So he did what millions of people do every day – asked a friend, who recommended two excellent sites for plasma TV reviews. He never ended up buying a TV (things just got too busy with search), but this was the moment of inspiration that lead us to build the product we are introducing today – a social search engine that enables people to search the expertise of their friends and community. [Read the rest on Yahoo! Search Blog]
All this trust-enhanced search and filtering and recommendations is what I’m trying to do with my PhD and I’m happy it is really taking off. About technology and metrics, they propose MyRank, as a successor of global trust metrics such as PageRank or the more recent TrustRank.
I didn’t play with it for now. And I really hope that Yahoo! is going to embrace the Open Web with this new service by giving Open API and export facilities (at the moment it seems so and I’m sure Flickr guys are going to suggest the right moves about that).
Ken Norton is collecting reactions from the blogosphere, or you can monitor who is speaking about My Web 2.0 on Technorati or BlogLines.
Otherwise read My Web 2.0 Blog (first post is by our great flickresque friend Caterina Fake).