Sunnyvale, California — To the amazement of many old-time librarians, web search has become the default first stop when most people do research. Yahoo, the Sunnyvale, California company will release a new tool today to help the number of people who can test its Search Pad service, an on-line notebook for saving and sharing notes, links and Web site content when conducting research. The latest release is Yahoo’s latest attempt to keep users within its search engine and better compete with Web services powers Google, Microsoft, Facebook and Twitter.
The idea behind Yahoo Search Pad is to automatically integrate your web searches results when it notices the user is doing research, which should make it easier for people to come back to a project on subsequent days to do more work.
For instance, Tom Chi, senior director of user experience at Yahoo Search, says that his refrigerator was acting up last week. As he searched for information about what might be going wrong, he was able to save each of his results, as well as notes from each page, in a Search Pad. That eliminated the effort of copying-and-pasting information into a separate document (since Search Pad copies links automatically as you search).
So, if a user doing research on health conditions, writing term papers, planning travel trips, buying real estate or looking for a job via Web search engines do a number of searchers on those topics to find the information they are looking for. Hence, when a users find anything useful, they have to copy and paste URLs or other content into separate notepad applications, such as Microsoft Wordpad or Google Notebook; bookmark relevant URLs; or e-mail themselves links.
Yahoo has refreshed and expanded the service’s features since unveiling it, such as adding ways to distribute its content, previously confined to e-mail. Search Pad content can now be disseminated through Yahoo’s Delicious social bookmarking service, Facebook and Twitter. However, Search Pad is still considered to be in a beta test period.
Other Web notebook programs have failed too, or none the less failed to become important. Tools like Google Notebook and JetEye are (or were) all very strong tools for saving Web search results, but they require intent on the part of the user. However, Search Pad will be on by default when people with access to it start using Yahoo’s search engine, and if it discovers that a person is doing research, it will ask if the person is taking notes. If the user answers “yes,” Search Pad will display a pop-up window with the sites the person has visited about the specific research topic, along with a description and a thumbnail of each page.
Yahoo anticipates that Search Pad will become an on-line alternative for people who save information they find on the Web in word processing files or scraps of paper, and by creating browser bookmarks.
People need not require a Yahoo account to use Search Pad, but Yahoo members who log in while using it will be able to save their research sessions. Additionally, users can also start Search Pad manually by clicking on its drop-down menu, located on the upper part of the search page on the right-hand column.
Currently, Search Pad works only with Yahoo’s main Web search engine, not with the company’s specialty engines for news, images and the like.
“We have been paying attention to this customer need for some time and on how to address it. Other search engines are not addressing it,” said Chi.
“With the ever growing competition, you either need to install something, or, more importantly, you need to change your search behavior pretty significantly,” Chi says.
He would not elaborate on whether Yahoo has any plans to make money from the service directly, either through advertising or fees. But regardless of what those plans are, the bigger goal here is to make Yahoo Search more useful and attractive.
Yahoo announced Search Pad this February, which has since been in limited testing, but now Yahoo will make it available to people in the U.S., Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Singapore, Malaysia, Philippines, U.K., France, Spain, Italy, Germany, Brazil, Mexico, and Argentina.
Yahoo Search Pad feature will be available to Yahoo.com search users Tuesday at 9 p.m. PDT.