Finally, after a full year since it was first announced, Yahoo has launched a search feature that it hopes will put it back into the competition with Microsoft’s recent release of Bing. The new tool removes the need for manual note taking, bookmarking, copy and pasting into word processors, and e-mailing links.
Search Pad is like a digital notepad, helping users organize their research on the web. The really cool thing about it is that it can predict when users are starting to do research, based on patterns in their search queries, and will ask them if they’d like to open Search Pad.
Search Pad allows users to collect listings from different searches into one page, as well as copy up to 2,000 characters from a page with drag-and-drop functionality. Yahoo will automatically attach an attribution to the copied text so that the information source can be easily located. This makes it an excellent bibliographical tool.
When the Search Pad detects that users are going into research mode, it begins saving the sites they’ve visited, with the capability to take notes on those sites.
The Search Pad notes, which are saved on a separate screen, can be edited and organized once compiled. Watch the demo video here.
Yahoo says that Search Pad is especially useful for those conducting research in topics like academia, health, jobs, travel and shopping.
Should users care to share their Search Pad pages with others, each Search Pad has a public URL, as well as social networking integration through Delicious, Twitter and Facebook. To save the pages though, users must have a Yahoo ID, but no plug-in is required to run the feature.
Yahoo has responded to worries about copyright infringement due to the copy-and-paste function by saying that the function meets fair use guidelines. Yahoo’s vice-president of product management and design for search, Larry Cornett, said that Yahoo cleared the methods with its lawyers and “are ready to go to bat for the customers.”
Search Pad is not the first feature of its kind. Google has a similar feature with its Google Notebook, but Yahoo Search Pad’s ability to auto-detect when someone is going into ‘research mode’ appears to give it the competitive advantage. Indeed, there are many other such digital note-taking tools on the market. It will be interesting to see how Yahoo’s Search Pad stacks up. Thus far, the reviews have been fairly positive, but a few weeks of public use should give us a better idea.
Search Pad went live in 15 countries, including the US, Canada, and the UK, on Tuesday June 7th at 9pm PST. The feature was first announced one year ago, and has been in testing since February of this year.
Yahoo is currently used for one-fifth of all US internet searches. This new feature could prove to be a big search loyalty booster for Yahoo.
Kaila Krayewski is a freelance journalist with a passion for all things internet. Having worked for nearly two years as the public relations manager for an internation search engine optimization company, and publishing hundreds of articles (how-to, informational, and otherwise) on SEO, she knows a thing or two about the field. Furthermore, having just started up her own website blondetraveler.com, she is doing her best to keep one step ahead of the search engines in order to keep the traffic flowing.
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