Yahoo to revamp My Web social bookmarking service

Yahoo Inc. plans to unveil improvements to its My Web social bookmarking service Tuesday, including a revamped interface designed to make it simpler to use.

The user interface changes are intended to make My Web more palatable to "everyday consumers," a spokesperson for the Sunnyvale, California company said Monday via e-mail.

Other improvements will include the integration of My Web results into the main Yahoo search engine, a move expected to expand the core index and increase the relevance of its results with Web site links handpicked and annotated first-hand by users.

My Web will also feature new sections called "Top Tags" and "Interesting Today," designed to let users know what topics are of interest to others at any given moment.

Moreover, users will be able to export bookmarks saved in My Web to any browser, and Yahoo has also removed the login requirement to access the service.

My Web, currently in version 2.0, is still in beta, or test, mode. It can be accessed at http://myweb2.search.yahoo.com/.

Yahoo last year acquired a company that ran a very similar service called del.icio.us, but the two services remain separate.

Like Yahoo, several other major search engines have services that allow users to save Web site links they find useful to a central server. Search engines are finding that the overall index of such services often tend to contain links that are more relevant to other users because they have been chosen by human beings, not by automated Web crawlers.