Yahoo is testing Yahoo Search Pad, a note-taking application that lets users take notes and organize searches.
Unlike Google Notebook or other note-taking tools, Search Pad allows you to stay on the same page to take notes and organize your research. Users can edit, delete, reorder, print and e-mail notes about topics that they've searched. Notes can also be saved and accessed later when a user logs on to Yahoo using his or her Yahoo ID. It is still in testing phase.
When the application detects research activity on a similar topic, rather than clicks on a single subject, a toolbar under the search box asks if the user wants to take notes. You can open the Search Pad yourself — in which case the application lists previous searches on similar topics — and classify all these in related categories.
Users can go about their usual surfing, searching information, cutting and pasting, using Search Pad to take notes while shifting back and forth between several pages. Search Pad then compares the notes to Yahoo's Web index and associates the clipped text with a URL. Users can share these notes, called documents, via e-mail with other people.
Yahoo's Search Pad may ring appealing in the sense that it appears to lend itself well to how individuals organize information. But it may prove of limited use for users; Yahoo recently found few people are in research/note-taking mode for long.
Microsoft launched a similar application, "instant answers," on its Internet Explorer 8 search tool.
