Tuesday 7 July 2009

Welcome to my (Search) Pad

Search innovators at Yahoo! have today launched Search Pad. Search Pad integrates with the usual Yahoo! Search interface and allows users to take notes while conducting common information seeking tasks (e.g. researching a holiday, whether to buy that new piece of gadgetry, etc.). Search Pad can track the websites users are visiting and is invoked when it considers the user to be conducting a research task. On the Yahoo! Search Blog today:
"Search Pad helps you track sites and make notes by intelligently detecting user research intent and automatically collecting sites the user visits. Search Pad turns on automatically when you're doing research, tracking sites to make document authoring a snap. You can then quickly edit and organize your notes with the Search Pad interface, which includes drag-and-drop functionality and auto-attributed pasting."
Nice. From the website and Yahoo! blog (and this video), Search Pad is in many ways reminiscent of Listas from Microsoft Live Labs (and discussed on this blog before). It's possible to copy text, images and create lists for sharing with others, either via URL or via other services (e.g. Facebook, Twitter, Delicious). Search Pad also has an easy to use menu driven interface. Whilst it was useful in some circumstances, Listas lacked a worthy application; however, Search Pad builds on Listas functionality and instead has incorporated an improved version of it within a traditional search interface to do something we often do when we are searching (i.e. take notes about a search task).

The only problem is that I can't get it to work!! I have tried conducting a variety of 'obvious' research tasks which I anticipated Search Pad would recognise, but the Search Pad console hasn't appeared. Perhaps the 'intelligent detection' isn't has intelligent as promised? I'll keep trying, but please let me know if anyone has better luck. Still, it demonstrates the state of permanent innovation at Yahoo! Search.

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