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My Yahoo!:
Create Your Own Page at Yahoo!
By Jon Kaufthal (7/17/96)
My Yahoo! finally went live on Monday night, giving us all a glimpse at how Yahoo! is envisioning the future for Web search engines and directories.
On visiting My Yahoo!, users are asked to register and to provide information about their tastes for a wide array of categories. Using cookies, My Yahoo! remembers what you like and don't like, so whenever you log on, the site feeds you the latest developments in your areas of interest.
My Yahoo! has four major sections to explore. A common navigation bar makes it easy to get around these sections, each of which has its own home page. The My Internet section includes a Yahoo! search form, as well as categories, keywords, and sites--all of which were chosen according to your registration and are fully customizable. To help track down a friend or business associate, the My Contacts section gives you a collection of directories, divided into White Pages, Yellow Pages, E-mail addresses, and Yahoo! Maps.
The My News page--also My Yahoo!’s default startup page--provides the latest news in the categories of your choice. Headlines, stock quotes, sports scores, and the latest local weather information are automatically provided. Throughout the site, My Yahoo! makes educated guesses--based on the information you entered at registration--at what your interests are and provides appropriate menus. To modify any menu, just click on the Edit button on that menu.
The most unique feature of My Yahoo! is its firefly/My Agent section, the product of a joint venture between Yahoo! and Agents Inc. (the makers of the firefly Internet agent technology). The firefly technology allows My Yahoo! to further personalize your page views by learning more about you as you use it. In the current beta version of My Yahoo!, the firefly/My Agent section is a bit inconsistent with the rest of the site's interface, but you can expect this to be corrected as the two services eventually become more integrated.
Copyright (c) 1996 Ziff-Davis Publishing Company
