Yahoo! for you-hoo with personalised search

Yahoo! wants to let you spin your own piece of the web. The internet portal is to introduce advanced navigation tools to let people store, search and share their favourite web pages - creating for users what it calls "My Web".

Yahoo! will begin testing the service, formally called My Yahoo! Search Beta, building on its relationship with 150 million registered consumers, (20 million using My Yahoo!) and advances in search technology.

The effort is only the latest in personalised web search and a first step for Yahoo! in its quest to build a "digital dashboard" for individuals on the PC. The dashboard will eventually let people search the PC for email, documents or information from their My Web of search archives, said Eckart Walter, Yahoo!'s director of product management for search.

"The web is going from mass media to my media, and we're applying the shift to Yahoo! Search," Walter said. "This is a first step going in the direction of personal search."

Yahoo! is joining rivals Google, Amazon.com's A9 and Ask Jeeves in the pursuit to personalise web search and own a greater portion of individuals' internet experience. These companies and others have long sought to create "stickiness" and encourage web surfers to return to their sites, but personalisation may be the Holy Grail in that regard.

Stephanie Olsen writes for News.com