Search Pad: Yahoo Actually Tries Something New (and Good!)

: Image via CrunchBase

Maybe things are finally turning around for Yahoo. Not only are they introducing something new, but it’s also not that bad.

Yahoo is debuting a new product (only available to some users) for testing today.

It’s called Search Pad, and it’s meant to help users save web pages and other information found while researching online.

I know it might sound a bit familiar. Microsoft is also testing a very similar product called Thumbtack. Google, on the other hand, has stopped working on its similar project called “Google Notebook“. In fact, one of the nicer products in this developing field is called Evernote, which helps save data from the physical world, too, not just stuff you find online.

Having viewed the demo video (below), it seems to present a very different approach to the problem. Whereas Thumbtack and the various notebooks function as more-or-less standalone products, Search Pad is closely integrated with Yahoo Search and can be seen as more of an extension of the search tool. Basically, it tracks your Yahoo search activity to see if it looks like research and automatically creates a document with all the pages you’ve visited, so you don’t have to manually record everything. At the same time, you can paste in other information you find online and take your own notes.