Legal Research

Yahoo Search Pad

By Simon Fodden

Yahoo Search has just launched a notepad that’s aimed at helping you do research on the web. It is, in effect, a replacement for the Notebook that Google killed a few weeks ago, and Yahoo hopes it will draw searchers into using their engine.

It’s a fairly simple but smart application: when Yahoo senses from your queries that you’re doing research, it will make Search Pad available in the upper right hand corner of your Yahoo Search window, along with some suggestions as to how your searches might be glossed. Search Pad will automatically capture the bones of your searches, will let you add notes, reorder your notes, and share them with others. I’ve only begun to play with it, and like all new tools it will take some getting used to. I can’t say it will replace Evernote for me (I haven’t tested Search Pad on my phone, yet, either), and it doesn’t have anything like the power of the Firefox plugin Zotero, but for many this is likely to be a truly useful way of taking notes on the fly. You have to have a Yahoo account and be signed in to use Search Pad.

Click here to see an image of Search Pad.

Full post as published by Slaw.ca on July 09, 2009 (boomark / email).