Contentinople - Erin Barker - News Bits: Yahoo Intros New 'Search Pad' Tool

Written by Erin Barker

Tuesday, July 7. 2009 at 11:15 AM EDT Post a comment

Digg

Del.icio.us

Email This

no ratings

Tonight at 9 p.m. PST, Yahoo Inc. (Nasdaq: YHOO) will launch Search Pad, an online notebook for saving and sharing material from search results, in hopes of boosting loyalty to its search engine.

Similar tools, such as Google Notebook or JetEye, have been released in the past only to fail with users, but those tools required users to ask for certain material to be saved.

In contrast, Search Pad picks up on when users are conducting research on Yahoo's search engine based on patterns in their search queries, then asks them if they'd like to start saving results. After that, search results are saved automatically.

Search Pad also has some other cool features. For instance, if you copy-and-paste text from a page in your search results, Search Pad can figure out later where you copied the text from.

In other news:

Facebook 's student population is dwindling, as the numbers of college and high school users dropped by 20 percent and 15 percent, respectively, in the last six months. Meanwhile, the number of Facebook users over 55 grew by nearly 600 percent over the same period. [Ed. note: Which means THIS could happen to YOU.]

Al Gore was one thing, but Twitter Inc. ? Deputy national security advisor Mark Pfeifle has argued that Twitter and its creators should win the Nobel Peace Prize, for the site's role in Iran's post-election chaos [ed. note: Because profitless Twitter could probably use more self-congratulation].

"Think about what Twitter has accomplished: It has empowered people to attempt to resolve a domestic showdown with international implications -- and has enabled the world to stand with them. It laid the foundation to pressure the world to denounce oppression in Iran," Pfeifle argued in the Christian Science Monitor, despite some claims that Twitter's role in Iran was exaggerated.

Tags: Business, Facebook, Search, Technology, Twitter, Yahoo

Digg

Del.icio.us

Email This

Comments
Be the first to post a comment regarding this story.