Experience with personalization of Yahoo!
Udi Manber, Ash Patel, John Robison · Communications of the ACM · 2000
In this artcle, we concentrate on three examples of personalization: My Yahoo!, Yahoo!Companion, and Inside Yahoo!Search.My Yahoo! (my.yahoo.com) is a customized personal copy of Yahoo!.Users can select from hundreds of modules, such as news, stock prices, weather, and sports scores, and place them on one or more Web pages.The actual content for each module is then updated automatically, so users can see what they want to see in the order they want to see it.This provides users with the latest information on every subject, but with only the specific items they want to know about.An example of a My Yahoo! page (with Yahoo!Companion) is shown in the accompanying figure.Space limitations prevent us from describing its many features; instead, we mention a few general issues:• Personalization often occurs inside the modules.For example, users can choose which TV channels they want to include in their TV guide in addition to which local cable system they use.Other modules are more general, for example, top health news.