The service will go live Tuesday night at 9:00 PM Pacific Time.
Basically, Search Pad pops up a window that saves your search process as clickable links, that can be saved to the Yahoo service if you're logged in. Search Pad will automatically collect visited sites and their thumbnails during your research session. You can also add their own notes and drag and drop additional content onto the window. The tool also allows users to print, email, or share the research via social networks such as Delicious, Facebook, and Twitter.
Google discontinued its similar Notebook service this past January, but Yahoo's implementation makes Search Pad more a part of the searching process, by proposing itself when your session looks like research, rather than a simple query. Likewise, Bing's search history feature shows all your previous searches in a sidebar and lets you save clicked links from a search to a local or online folder in its SkyDrive service.
"At Yahoo Search we are committed to understanding people's intent and building the right tools to help them complete their most important tasks online," said Larry Cornett, vice president of consumer products, at Yahoo Search. "With Search Pad, Yahoo is providing an elegant solution that understands when valuable research is being conducted and offers a way to effortlessly gather information in one place. Yahoo Search Pad helps people make decisions, save their work, and share the best with friends and colleagues."
To try the service out for yourself, after 9:00PM tonight Pacific Time, simply enter six or more related searches, say on a planned trip, and you'll see Search Pad proposed. It remains to be seen whether the feature will help Yahoo make a comeback in a search market that, on the one hand, remains dominated by Google and on the other is being aggressively pursued by Microsoft.
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