July 08, 2009

Yahoo! has equipped its primary search engine with what you might call an automated note taker.

Known as Search Pad, this integrated applet is meant to facilitate web research. As you browse the net, it automatically records visited websites and their thumbnail images on a kind of digital notepad built directly into Yahoo!'s search results page. You can then annotate this info with your own notes, print it out, email it, or - yes - share it by way of so-called social networks.

The applet is reminiscent of existing net note taking tools like Clipmarks, Google Notebook, or Jeteye. But unlike these apps, Search Pad is built directly into the search engine itself, and the onus isn't on the user to do the note taking. Initial notes are recorded in the background, by the app itself.

"There's nothing you need to install. No other window you need to switch to, no other document you need to open that's outside the natural environment you search in in the first place," Yahoo! senior director of product experience Tom Chi tells The Reg. "This lets us help the user by rapidly assembling notes and, in a way, making sense of what they're doing."

According to Chi, the tool grew out of some in-home user studies the company performed about a year and a half ago. "We spent a lot of time going to people's homes, trying to understand their search behavior.