Firefox Search Plugin For Yahoo! My Web 2.0 Beta

Like many Flickr people I was intrigued by the Flickr Blog suggestion to try out Yahoo!'s My Web 2.0 Beta test. I love the idea of trying to use collaborative filtering with search results - at one point within the BBC we spent a lot of time trying to work out whether we could leverage the use of our search by teachers and the like to improve the Best Links we provided in specific areas.

Anyway, like Lloyd, I also immediately got confused with My Web 2.0. I'd installed the Yahoo! toolbar for Firefox - which had a very clear and easy set of step-by-step instructions by the way - and then kept finding myself bouncing between the 1.0 service that the toolbar was accessing, and the 2.0 beta which I kept hitting when I was using my bookmark.

I've got to grips with that now, and hidden the toolbar until it is pointing at v2.0. Still, to really test a service you have to embed it into your normal pattern of behaviour, so I've knocked up a quick Firefox Search Plugin for the 2.0 Beta service. You need to download the .src file and the .gif, and pop them in the searchplugins folder in your install of Firefox.

• yahoo_myweb2_beta.src
• yahoo_myweb2_beta.gif

The plugin also works in Mozilla, but doesn't produce the list of results in the search sidebar - I figured I'd let someone who uses that wrestle with the <interpret> tag and Yahoo!'s HTML.

Mind you it has occurred to me that some of the gubbins in the URL may be identifying my web 2.0 specifically - let me know if it doesn't work for you!

<ADDED>There is a Yahoo! Bookmarklet to save pages to My Web 2.0 Beta at http://myweb2.search.yahoo.com/myresults/faq#toolbarsupport

Posted by Martin Belam, July 2, 2005    
Read the latest posts about: Search, Yahoo
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