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Yahoo Search Pad Source: Yahoo |
Yahoo is readying a public beta for this Wednesday of Search Pad, a service it’s already promoted and previewed at various industry events.
Search Pad brings both collaboration and other time-saving features to search. With Search Pad activated, search links are recorded into an integrated notepad for easy reference or to be shared with others via e-mail.
The Search Pad feature activates when a user appears to be conducting research-related searches. Examples might include searching for a vacation or a new car and the patterns related to that that Search Pad recognizes. Search Pad asks if you want to start saving the results and if you answer yes, it saves them in a separate screen. The Search Pad screen can be edited or supplemented with a user’s own comments or notes.
You need to be logged in with a Yahoo ID to save the information in your personal account for retrieval from a Web-connected PC or portable computer.
Larry Cornett, vice president of consumer products at Yahoo Search said Search Pad is part of the company’s effort to gain a deeper understanding of user intent beyond what a simple keyword entry can provide.
“Traditional search is good for quick navigational queries, but not for going deeper,” Cornett told InternetNews.com.
While there are other tools that let you capture or copy what you might do in a Web session, Cornett says Search Pad is unique in how it’s integrated directly to the search experience. “There’s no click away to another application and it leverages our deep search technology,” he said.
A Search Pad user could, for example, copy over a paragraph of text about a camera for sale on Amazon.com and Search Pad would analyze the text in real-time to determine the URL so the page could be retrieved later.
“The search engine to date has been one query and a set of results,” Tom Chi, Yahoo’s senior director of user experience, told InternetNews.com. “Search Pad is a tool that opens new, multiple queries and new avenues to find the answers you’re looking for.”
You can see a preview demo of how Search Pad works here.