Last week Yahoo! released Yahoo! Search Pad, an additional search tool aimed at helping you more efficiently keep track of your searches, making notes on particular results. So if you're using search to research a particular project or topic, you can keep track of the useful URLs that you've found, make notes on each one, and then save those notes and results to a webpage so that you can share them with others.
Is it useful? Well, for general browsing no, not really. However, if you're spending time looking up trip information, or researching a potential purchase and comparing vendors, then yes, it's very useful. This is an interesting move from Yahoo! but isn't really anything new. A number of years ago Ask.com launched MyStuff, a similar concept which allowed searchers to save results and review them later. Yahoo! has simply gone a little further and added the ability to publish these results as a shareable web page.
Still, it's good to see that the secondary search engines haven't given up the search ghost under Google's market dominance.
Yahoo! Search Pad in action - image from Yahoo! website
