Last month it was Bing; this month it’s Search Pad. As the traditional search underdogs like Microsoft and Yahoo! battle it out with the search engine monopoly Google, the online world is experiencing launch after launch of new search engine platforms and tools and exciting, innovative features.
Tomorrow, Yahoo! is due to go live with a beta of Search Pad, its new-fangled search tool, which promises to be a novel improvement to search. After months of aggressively trying to gain a greater understanding of user intent, Yahoo! has created a new instrument, which it has been actively previewing for the past few weeks, that is aimed at improving research capabilities.
So what makes this new search feature different? According to demos, Search Pad gives users greater control to organize their searches by allowing them to save previous inquiries and share these results with other users. According to Yahoo! Search Blog “Search Pad helps you track sites and make notes by intelligently detecting user research intent and automatically collecting sites the user visits.”
Once you’ve registered a Yahoo! ID, Search Pad turns automatically activates when you’re conducting research through Yahoo! search. Once logged in, users are able to record their links and track their sites and searches into an integrated notepad which can be easily referenced or shared with other users. “You can then quickly edit and organize your notes with the Search Pad interface, which includes drag-and-drop functionality and auto-attributed pasting.” All of this is intended to help searches save time and effort, as it is integrated directly into the Yahoo! Search engine platform.
Because Search Pad is still in its earliest stages, it is still unclear how precisely it will change the search game or if it will help Yahoo! compete with Google Search and the growing Microsoft engine, Bing.
To see exactly how Search Pad works, click here for a demo video.