Yahoo! is giving a trial run to a new feature in its web search service. It's called Search Pad, and it (supposedly) automatically detects when you're doing research on a particular topic and creates a pad of links and other notes from what you're looking at.

Just make a few related searches and it should pop up a message asking if you'd like it to take notes. Say yes, and it will record websites you visit. You can copy and paste text from a website and it will search the web for the address of that site and then include that as well.

Google has a Notebook application that does some similar things, but it's not as deeply integrated into search. Yahoo! has a useful video that demonstrates how all this works, but in our experience it's not quite perfect. In our tests it often failed to recognize that we were doing research, so it wouldn't pop up and ask us if it should start taking notes.

If you can get it to work, though, it's pretty useful — that is, if you already use Yahoo! instead of Google for your web searches.

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