Yahoo released its new toolbar this week. This toolbar very well may begin to shift the balance of market share from Google with its page rank feature on its tool bar to Yahoo and all the new bookmarking features they are proving. The Yahoo bar goes way beyond the basics of book marking the title and web address. What the new Yahoo toolbar does is to capture a thumbnail image of a web site, and even save the full text of a web page. In addition, Yahoo gives a user the ability to add buttons right to the tool bar, such as favorites, where the tool bar searches for an IE icon, and if present on the site, adds that icon right to the toolbar as the button for the page.

Chris Sherman, Executive Editor of Search Engine Watch recently wrote, “Adding a thumbnail image to a bookmark helps recall—it's easier for people to remember an image of a page than it is to recall what a page is about from a simple title and URL.”

Just as other tagging properties that Yahoo owns such as Del.icio.us, users can tag sites using the tool bar. Yahoo will suggest tags to associate with a page, or you can set your own. However, there is a big difference between these tags and bookmarks and the shared bookmarks on Del.icio.us. These are not meant to be public, and will not be saved to your Del.icio.us account. However, one wonders if this tagging and saving of bookmarks may not just be used in some way to enhance the relevancy of search results, adding yet another powerful tool to the already impressive list of social networking applications developed or purchased by Yahoo.