Confession time: I do almost all of my Web searching these days at one site, and its name isn’t Yahoo. But I’m intrigued by Yahoo’s Search Pad, a new feature that’s entering testing today. It looks a bit like the soon-to-be-defunct Google Notebook and other existing services, except Search Pad is designed to be smart enough to notice you’re engaging in Web research, whereupon it offers to help you collate sites, snippets of info, and notes.

Only certain Yahoo users are seeing the feature so far, not including me. So most of what I know about it, I know from this video produced by Yahoo:

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I’m instinctively skeptical about software and services that think they’re smart enough to figure out what you’re doing and help–call it the “Clippy thinks I’m writing a letter” syndrome–and I’m not clear on whether Search Pad can be invoked manually. (Seems like it should: When I’m researching something on the Web, I’m usually keenly aware that I’m researching something on the Web.) But the video has whetted my appetite sufficiently that I’ll check back to see when Search Pad shows up for me…

 
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