DigitalBeat

Much to the despair of old-school librarians, web search has become the default first stop when most people do research. And tomorrow Yahoo is releasing a new tool called Search Pad to make that process even easier.

The idea behind Search Pad is to integrate your web searches with your notes. For example, Tom Chi, senior director of user experience at Yahoo Search, says that his refrigerator was acting up last week. As he searched for information about what might be going wrong, he was able to save each of his results, as well as notes from each page, in a Search Pad. That eliminated the effort of copying-and-pasting information into a separate document (since Search Pad copies links automatically as you search). It also meant that he didn’t have to start from scratch every time he returned to the research. Chi says he was able to find the problem and fix it on his own, but if he wanted, he could also have shared his results with others via a social networking service like Facebook or Twitter, or by printing his Search pad.

Yahoo announced Search Pad earlier this year, but it’s not going live to the general public until tomorrow, July 7, at 9pm Pacific. Back in February, I speculated on how this new tool might improve on competing services like Evernote and Microsoft’s Thumbtack, not to mention the Notebook feature that Google shut down earlier this year. Perhaps the key distinction, as Chi pointed out, is that Search Pad is integrated directly into Yahoo Search — it’s part of the search process, rather than a separate service or browser add-on. You don’t even need a Yahoo account, although you’ll want one if you’re going to save Search Pads between sessions.

“With the competition, you either need to install something, or, more importantly, you need to change your search behavior pretty significantly,” Chi says.

He won’t say whether Yahoo has any plans to make money from the service directly, either through advertising or fees. But regardless of what those plans are, the bigger goal here is to make Yahoo Search more useful and attractive.

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