Social search is here. Yahoo! introduced My Web 2.0 beta this evening, the first step towards personalized and social search online. I have been exploring the new service for the past half-hour and I am impressed. Personalized search and extending that search to a network of friends is an intensive computational operation and I am surprised Yahoo! has pulled it off.
What can you do with My Web 2.0? Each search is limited to your saved bookmarks and the bookmarks of your friends my default. Every bookmark has an option for one or more tags and Yahoo! will suggest tags as you type. Yahoo! saves a snapshot of every page you save by default.
I like browsing the search results just to see what my contacts are up to. A search for “hiring” shows me what corporate employment web pages are currently bookmarked by my contacts.
Notice how Yahoo! made the My Web logo look like the Flickr logo with the text colored blue and the last letter colored magenta. Yahoo! also opened up API calls to retrieve tag information about a URL, search results for tags, and related tag information. It’s impressive that Yahoo! has the hardware and the people to pull off a project of this scale.