Expectant surprise then mere disappointment – those are what one encounters when one uses the Yahoo Search Pad. Launched as a free service, with no content downloads, installations or other hassles required, this service generated a lot of hype and subsequently, a lot of expectations; especially after the marketing stalwarts at Yahoo unveiled a demo video earlier this year, portraying Yahoo Search Pad as the ultimate consumer-friendly search assistant. Yahoo Search Pad has been marketed as a search engine notepad that can assist you with your researches (searches on specific topics) on the Internet by automatically saving notes for you, so can leave the research midway and resume it later, organize your notes, and share all the research jottings you have taken down, with family and friends. Yes, it is that basic a product. Wondering why nobody thought of it earlier?

Well, people have. We have had some marginally successful attempts like Google Notebook, Jeteye, among others at creating search engine notepads. But, the innovation that gets Yahoo Search Pad at the top of the product chain is the linking of Search Pads with Social Networking websites. I mean, who wouldn’t want to research stuff when you can publish it and show-off your glorious findings on the Internet, to all those who care to see?

The Yahoo Search Pad helps you in your research by saving it for later reference. Image Courtsey: tothetech.com.

Features and Usage:

One of the major benefits of using the Yahoo Search Pad is its instinctive ease of use. Just log on to the Yahoo Search Engine, sign in to your Yahoo ID, click on the small ‘pen and pad’ icon you see below the header on the top right on  the search results page, create a new notebook and you’re all set to get down to researching! As you research, this wonder of a notepad will automatically detect the topics of your research and save addresses of URLs related to your research accompanied by snapshots of those webpages. You can also manually add text notes and organize your notes bulk in any fashion you see fit. The Search Pad will then try to search for the references of your text notes and will automatically label them with URLs, if the text comes from a popular page. And finally, when you are done editing and organizing your research, you can share it on Facebook, Twitter, or Delicious, providing others the opportunity to browse through and gain from your research. Unfortunately, the wonderment ends here, and disappointment follows.

A Search Pad notebook: Organize your notes and share them with the world! Image Courtsey: venturebeat.com.

Criticism:

For all its intelligence in automatically finding out what you’re searching for, Yahoo! Search Pad seems to have a simple algorithm built into it: If the researcher is spending more than a minute at a particular URL, note it down! This will become more clear the from the following experiment I performed, which gave a result that can be recreated with ease:

I researched on a popular PC video game called Batman: Arkham Asylum. I visited a generous list of popular game reviewing websites like IGN, Gamespot, 1up, and others, and made manual text notes on the Search Pad by copy-pasting content from most of those websites, to test if the Search Pad could automatically find references for them. The Search Pad was mildly efficient at this, only finding correct URLs for some 30-40% of the manual notes taken down. This exercise continued for some 7-10 minutes and through it, I had thoroughly ‘trained‘ the Search Pad into knowing what I was researching on. Now, to test the Pad’s Artificial Intelligence, I opened YouTube in one of the open tabs and searched for ‘Funny Cats’. I sat through the 2:46 minutes of the amusing first video that appeared on the search results. I then looked in the Search Pad to check whether it was confused through the abrupt change of  research topics. To my mild surprise, the Search Pad had recorded the Video URL in a long list of URLs that had Batman written all over them and had nothing to do with humor or, well, cats. I again searched for Goobuntu, an unrelated topic, and took a minute reading the wiki page that was first to show up in the results. Needless to say, the Search Pad had again recorded the wiki URL in a notebook that was filled with references from an entirely disconnected topic.
It becomes clear from the above exercise that the Yahoo Search Pad can get confused as easily as it can help you with your research. Relying on the Search Pad to ‘artificially know’ what you want is a hope in vain. The Pad is simply a book keeping tool when you’re indulging in Extremely specific researches (also, the Yahoo website help section provides no information whatsoever on whether the Search Pad will work Search Engines other than Yahoo). And I would want echo what I said earlier, the prospect of sharing your researches on Social Networks remains the most powerful feature of this Pad.

Verdict:

The Yahoo Search Pad is definitely a inventive offering with ambitious thought behind it, but it fails to implement much of that ambitiousness. We also think that the Search Pad might not witness explosive popularity but will influence and force the software industry big wigs to think and re-think their ideas behind the Next Gen of Search Assistants.

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