I was just getting ready to write something about Google’s new search history feature (which allows you to automatically keep track of Google searches you have done and even limit subsequent searches to the pages you clicked on as the result of those searches, helping you find pages you remember finding via Google but can’t find again when you need them) when, lo and behold, Yahoo! one-ups Google with Yahoo! My Web within the span of a single week. (Note that, from now on, I’m going to drop the exclamation point from Yahoo! since it makes me want to put an exclamation point after! every! word!)

Despite having a really corny name, My Web is great, and it even has a toolbar for Mozilla Firefox that allows you to save a page with a single click–finally, the days are starting to arrive when those of us who use Linux on the desktop aren’t second class citizens.

Note that this move is sheer brilliance–we Linux desktop users are still second class citizens in Google’s eyes, as they don’t offer a Firefox version of their toolbar yet. It’s brilliance because installing the toolbar asked me if I wanted to change my default search engine to Yahoo. Sure, what the heck. And, you know what? I’m finding it gives me results that are just as good as Google. Moreover, it’s not just apples for apples: the searches I type into the Firefox search box are reflected in the Yahoo toolbar (so I now have ready access to a history of my searches), saved in My Search History (a similar feature to Google’s new one), etc. In other words, there’s better integration with the rest of my online stuff. Google has the raw materials to match Yahoo in the integration department, though their identity story is less consistent and much weaker than Yahoo’s. By embracing Linux through their Firefox toolbar, Yahoo has won the chance to win me over from Google. Smart move, Yahoo. It’s all about integration.

Probably the most interesting aspect of My Web is that it has an API. They’re even experimenting with attention.xml support. I can’t wait to see what independent developers do with this. They show remarkable wisdom with this statement: “As is often the case with brand new ideas, we haven’t really figured out how exactly this should work, but there’s only one way to find out.” What? You don’t know everything, Yahoo? That makes two of us. Given that, it’s smarter to focus on building a platform, then see what others dream up–just make sure to keep it open, or it won’t be a particularly good platform.

Oh, and as if this wasn’t enough, Yahoo also revamped its news site last week.

There are a couple of features I’d like to see, such as better integration with Yahoo Bookmarks, so I can save pages and get to my saved pages in the same way I’ve been doing for years; and del.icio.us like tagging and sharing features, about which I don’t have much to say because I haven’t tried del.icio.us yet (though one thing I do know a priori is that I want tagging etc. to integrate with the rest of my stuff).

With three giants (Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo) battling it out to win over folks like me, and others (Microsoft, Apple, and the various Linux companies) working to integrate the edge nodes with the core services in new and innovative ways (made possible through the availability of APIs), the Internet operating system is shaping up to be very, very good indeed. I can’t wait to see what’s coming next.