Yahoo tears page from Google Notebook with Search Pad
Google may have closed down its Google Notebook web clipping tool nearly three years after releasing it, but the apparent failure of that concept hasn't stopped Yahoo from announcing its own. Dubbed Search Pad, Yahoo's new tool acts like a smart research companion, offering one of the company's most integrated attempts at innovating the post-search process of using the Web.
Announced on the Yahoo Search Blog Wednesday, Search Pad is "in testing and is not visible to all users," or what is otherwise known as "private beta." A demonstration video below reveals Search Pad to be a kind of intelligent notepad that watches your Yahoo searches and can sniff out when you're doing research on things like planning a family trip or finally buying that HDTV you have always wanted.
Perform a search, copy some content from a page, return to Yahoo and perform another search, and Search Pad will prompt you to begin saving the pages and content you found in a JavaScript popup. You can add notes, quote text, and save thumbnails from each visited site to pick them out of a crowd more easily. When you are finished, you can save a session of notes and links as a collection (a kind of notebook as it were) for using or expanding upon later.
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