Webware100

Yahoo's Briefcase service is a far cry from the arms race of free and low-cost storage providers on the Web, but it's wonderfully simple. Yahoo gives you 30MB of file storage you can keep and store at no cost. Users can create as many folders as they'd like and dump their files in one at a time, or en masse via a Web uploader.

What makes the service particularly useful is that you set the access of each file and folder with different levels of privacy, meaning if it's time to send that 25MB folder of photos to mom and dad, you can make sure they're the only ones you're giving access to.

Winner: Yahoo Briefcase (Birefcase.Yahoo.com)
Category: Utility

Yahoo Groups provides an easy and simple way to create online groups using nothing more than your Yahoo account. It's completely free, and offers users a place for group photo albums, calendaring, forums, and link sharing. It's great for making dead simple work groups online, and if you're feeling like some entertainment, you can join one of the publicly created groups that are available to everyone.

The groups on Yahoo run the gamut from simple fan gatherings for celebrities, all the way to tech support for commercial products. What gets the most use, however, are the integrated forums, which lay host to huge multithreaded discussions from group members. Often the content from these posts end up on other Yahoo sites, such as Yahoo Answers or Flickr.

Winner: Yahoo Groups (Groups.Yahoo.com)
Category: Social

Yahoo Search is Yahoo's answer to Google. It originally started out as a way to search through Yahoo content and has since evolved into its own search engine for content elsewhere on the Internet. Like similar competing search engines, Yahoo lets users search through Web sites, images, and video. They can even find things close to them through their local search. It also features a stark white and simplistic layout, where the focus is on the results.

Similar to other search services, Yahoo caches content around the Web. This makes it viewable in a limited capacity, even when the site is down or no longer exists.

Yahoo has integrated its search engine into dozens of various Yahoo products and services. Users are also able to integrate it into their Web sites.

Winner: Yahoo (Yahoo.com)
Category: Search

Yahoo Calendar is Yahoo's free day, week, month, and yearly planning tool. Users with Yahoo accounts can create their own calendar for free and share it with others. Creating new events is a simple affair. Anyone can link up an event or task to several e-mail addresses and get reminders on a variety of devices and services including Yahoo Messenger or on their mobile phones.

In addition to its planning roots, Yahoo's Calendar doubles as a task scheduler where users can set priorities and make their own to-do list complete with time zone control and highly customizable due dates. There's also a huge directory of events you can add-on to your calendar such as U.S. holidays, horoscopes, and daily weather reports.

Winner: Yahoo Calendar (Calendar.Yahoo.com)
Category: Productivity

Yahoo Mail is Yahoo's free, Web-based e-mail service. The newest release feels a lot like a desktop e-mail application: there's a preview pane, and messages can be dragged-and-dropped between folders. Right-clicking the mouse does mail-specific things instead of performing browser actions. There's no longer any concept of paging through your in-box. You can see all of your messages, no matter how many there are, in one big, scrolling list.

Besides e-mail, Yahoo Mail offers users built in instant messaging, weather reports, and an RSS reader that users can parse through as they would their e-mail.

Winner: Yahoo Mail (Mail.Yahoo.com)
Category: Communication

Yahoo Shopping is Yahoo's e-commerce site. It lets you search for items listed online and highlights some of the good deals from around the Web. In addition to its own search tool, it employs deals from various online partners including Woot.com for a special version of Woot aimed specifically at Yahoo shoppers.

While Google's shopping tool focuses mainly on search, Yahoo Shopping takes more of a directory approach. You can browse products from all over the Web in a giant catalog. It also keeps track of some of the most popular deals from its members, forming a hot list that might help shoppers find potential deals. Despite its directory like approach, Yahoo Shopping's strength relies around its price comparison engine, which it gained in 2004 with the acquisition of European start-up Kelkoo.

Winner: Yahoo Shopping (Shopping.Yahoo.com)
Category: Commerce

My Yahoo is a customizable start page that users can fill with a variety of personalized content feeds. Like some other single-page aggregators, My Yahoo centers around its directory, which is filled with all sorts of feeds--some from third-party sources, while others are in-house Yahoo content. People can mix and match, move things around, and custom-tailor their page however they please.

In addition to content, users can also pick from a wide variety of themes to decorate their page. Each of these themes can be customized, including color and font.

Winner: My Yahoo (My.Yahoo.com)
Category: Browsing

Category: Mobile

Yahoo's OneSearch is a streamlined search for mobile devices. It returns results specific to your location, which is handy when you're on a mobile. You can also check your Yahoo Mail and get news, sports scores, stocks, weather, and directions.

The site is optimized for Web browsers on small devices. And for users who don't want to use up precious data just to get to the search box, there's an SMS front end to the service.

Web site: Mobile.Yahoo.com/onesearch

Winners in this category: