If you are anywhere near a teen whose college years are in view, you know that the college-search (not to mention college-application) process has changed dramatically in recent years. Credit the web with all of the changes.

The companies that have long published well-known college guides still do, but they have also moved online with sites that help students figure out what colleges they are interested in attending. Names like the Princeton Review, the College Board, Kaplan, and Thomson Peterson are among them. As The New York Times noted in its recent "The College Issue" magazine, these are often the first stops along the search. But it was only a matter of time before some recent college grads would create sites built with social-networking features that highlight reviews by the some of the best sources on college campuses -- students.

That's what drove Michael Kim to develop Yollege, a web site designed for college-bound students to explore colleges via the web and get immediate reviews and opinions from students attending those colleges. Not the tour guides vetted by the school administration. Any student who wants to go online and have a say about his school can do so on Yollege. Teens can set up a "My Yollege" and start compiling info on colleges they are interested in attending.

Kim attended the University of California at Davis, so Yollege started there and has built up to include thousands of reviews from students at colleges including the other University of California campuses, NYU, and Boston College. Any student can go onto the site and write about all aspects of life at her college. Currently, there are more than 4,000 reviews on the site, and it's building. A staff of editors check the comments to make sure they are relevant, Kim says.

"In this day and age, there's so much info," Kim says. "No longer should people base a college decision on Newsweek and other magazine rankings."

The Times highlighted another site built on student reviews, Unigo. There are editors who each oversee 10 schools, but the site runs on the views of students who write what they think about the school, good and bad. No comments are eliminated and schools are not invited to include their materials.

For the Facebook generation that has come of age on the web and often makes decisions on what to buy, listen to and do based on web site reviews, these kinds of sites are natural additions to the college search. The more info the better when such a big, expensive decision is at hand.

If you've tried Yollege or Unigo or any other similar sites, let us know what you think.