Yahoo!'s Search Pad Goes Live

Yahoo!'s (YHOO) Search Pad, a search feature the company has been developing to help users store and organize their search results, will go live Tuesday, the Wall Street Journal and other publications report.

Yahoo! has been testing the feature -- which allows users to take and save notes as they visit Web sites -- since February. The company has made a few minor refinements during the test, the Journal reports, citing people familiar with the launch, details of which couldn't be learned.

Yahoo! will make Search Pad available Tuesday to people in the U.S., Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Singapore, Malaysia, Philippines, U.K., France, Spain, Italy, Germany, Brazil, Mexico, and Argentina, reports the IDG News Service.

Search Pad works by detecting when a user is doing research and will ask if that person is taking notes. It then asks the user if he wants to begin saving the results and if the answer is "yes," saves the links a user clicks on a separate screen so he can also take notes, according to the Journal. Users who are logged in can access their links and notes another time and share them with friends.

Google(GOOG) and Microsoft(MSFT) also have their own Web notes services, so it's not clear if Yahoo's new feature will help it gain back search market share.

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