San Francisco — As part of its ongoing effort to energize and intensify its search engine to compete with Google and Microsoft, Yahoo has started testing a new project called “Search Pad” intended to help users effortlessly acquire in-depth research and help you keep track of your results to complete important tasks.
Yahoo on Wednesday said in a blog post that it was experimenting on a new tool to help people better organize the abundance of information that crops up while doing research on the Web.
Yahoo Search Pad helps users keep track of search query terms used while doing research on the site and, when it detects a trend, offers to save the result in an online document. If you take its advice, it shows you a page already populated with the Web sites you have browsed on the subject.
Search Pad indicates such as time spent on a site and other search patterns help show whether a user is attempting to navigate a site, find specific information, or collect volumes of information on a single topic.
The note-taking program, built inside Yahoo Search, automatically gathers and saves information and links to sites as a user visits them. It appears on the upper-right hand corner of search results.
The video displays the application as a useful tool for planning vacations and shopping, as well as conducting academic research. The information is saved to users’ Yahoo ID.
“With Search Pad, you can effortlessly organize your work and you do not even need to keep re-finding things,” the video narrator explains.
The video says Yahoo Search Pad simplifies planning and research and urges users to “Give it a try.”
According to the reports on hand, Yahoo Search Pad allows users to organize, capture, manage and share information they collect in the course of their online research.
Tom Chi, senior director of Product Management, Yahoo Search said in a blog post, “Our user studies show that people often use word-processing documents, sticky notes, emails, bookmarks (or a combination of the above) to record what they find on the Web. These methods can be quite cumbersome and require extra steps which are time-consuming and distracting. Search Pad tackles this problem by intelligently detecting users’ research intent, automatically collecting visited sites, and providing simple tools for users to organize and add notes, all in one place.”
“Hence, users can effortlessly edit, delete, and re-order notes they have collected on a topic, and then print them out or email them to friends and family. They can also save the notes to access later by logging in with their Yahoo! ID. This helps to make online research much more productive and convenient.” added Chi.
“It is our aim to help people doing research with Yahoo are able to be more effective. That may drive more engagement or drive them to come back more often,” said Larry Cornett, vice president for product for Yahoo Search.
Yahoo has begun publicly testing the service, but only with a small, randomly-selected fraction of its users, the company said, and the service should be enabled for all users in coming months.
Search Pad is similar in concept to Google Notebook — a product the Web-search leader opted to halt development on last month.
By Wednesday afternoon, almost 2,500 people had viewed the video demonstration, which was posted late Tuesday evening.