I intended to put Yahoo's new MyWeb feature, which went into public beta today today, through some basic paces. MyWeb basically consists of two personal productivity features -- personal search history and the ability to save and search local copies of selected sites, and integrated email and IMing of selected content. It's mostly integrated with the Yahoo toolbar, as well.

I downloaded the Firefox extension for Mac and started playing with but despite repeated tests and several conversations with Yahoo PR, the local search history simply didn't work. It did work in Safari, though, so I eventually got a feel for it. Yahoo PR confirmed that there are still some problems with the feature and are working to take care of them in the next development cycle.

At first blush, the personal search looks like copycatting of Google's recently launched personal search function, but it's a project that has been in development for many months. In any case, the point goes to Google's Search History, which displays all of your search terms and organizes visited sites by those terms. Yahoo displays only the sites you visit in chronological order. They do allow you to comment on the sites, and those comments appear whenever the site comes up as a result in a Yahoo search.

The MyWeb function lets you click a button on the toolbar to add a site to your local cache, and the web interface lets you search your MyWeb or the whole web.

Points go to Yahoo for letting users easily turn the search archiving on and off and for making it easy to remove certain sites from your cache. Google takes an attitude of "Don't worry - we do no evil," which is not entirely convincing.

Ultimately, though, I have a hard time seeing MyWeb as a feature a lot of people will embrace. Being able to search the bit of the Web that you actually use, as opposed to the whole thing, is intriguing but intentionally choosing to save certain sites doesn't stack up that well compared to del.icio.us, where you have the whole social dynamic for discovery. One person adding a note to a saved website really pales in comparison to the tagging ecology on sites like del.icio.us.

MyWeb also integrates with email and Yahoo messenger, which seems sort of nice, but in reality, does is that how people really work? If you live in your IM, you'd be more likely to cut and paste the URL into your IM stream.

Update: A reader points out that MyWeb folders do indeed generate their own RSS feeds.

Perhaps Yahoo will add some RSS functionality to MyWeb, which would help. I might be more interested in MyWeb-ing sites if it generated an RSS feed of those sites, that I could share with people, or if I could tag or categorize them in certain ways. Actually, Yahoo doesn't have to add it because of the open APIs that allow third-party developers to add functionality. I guess we'll see who picks up on that offer. But as far as this app goes, technical problems aside, I'm a bit underwhelmed.