Posts filed under 'Online Industry'

Making research easier with Search Pad

July 9th, 2009 Add comment

People have been clamouring to get their hands on Search Pad since we showed a demo video earlier this year. Today we are rolling out Search Pad so you can see for yourself how it can help you organise research on the Web.

Search Pad helps you track sites and make notes by intelligently detecting your research intent and automatically collecting sites you visits. Search Pad turns on automatically when you’re doing research, tracking sites to make document authoring a snap. You can then quickly edit and organise your notes with the Search Pad interface, which includes drag-and-drop functionality and auto-attributed pasting.

For example, if you are planning a trip to Kakadu National Park, Search Pad detects your research intent and asks if you’d like to take notes. Search Pad then saves the sites you’ve visited, like the tourism office or an adventure tour operator, and lets you take more notes on the information you’ve found.

Kakadu Searchpad

You can save your documents using your Yahoo! ID so you can access your documents from anywhere on the Web.  This helps you save any research you’ve done so you needn’t do the same searches over and over again.

Saving search...

After you’ve done your research, you can publish your document to a permanent URL to share with friends and family so they can check out your trip itinerary and chime in with tips. Using Search Pad, you can share research on that new digital camera that you are checking out, things to do this weekend, or any other research you might do on the Web. You can even share Search Pad documents on Facebook, Twitter, or Delicious.

Sharing your search...

Search Pad can help you save your work across an entire session or even multiple sessions. Our intent detection allows us to offer Search Pad during sessions where it is most needed, and stay out of the way when it’s not. Of course, you can also opt to use Search Pad directly at any point during your research.

At Yahoo!, we’re always looking for ways to innovate in search by challenging the model that search is just about a keyword and 10 blue links. We are constantly improving our technology and experience in ways that people need most — Search Pad is just the latest result of those efforts.

Search Pad went live today in Australia, along with 14 other countries including the U.S., Canada, New Zealand, Singapore, Malaysia, Philippines, United Kingdom, France, Spain, Italy, Germany, Brazil, Mexico, and Argentina.  See for yourself how Search Pad can help you save time, share information easily, and make the hardest search research tasks more manageable.

Give it a try. We look forward to hearing your feedback.

Tony Kinner
Search Product Manager

Jeff Goldblum tops the lot

July 3rd, 2009 1 comment

Last Friday was an extraordinary day. First we awoke to the tragic news that both Farrah Fawcett, of Charlie’s Angels fame, and Michael Jackson had passed away. Then came the rumours, fuelled by Twitter, that Jeff Goldblum had fallen to his death, famously leading to Richard Wilkins announcing on the Today show that this had been confirmed by the New Zealand Police. Fortunately for Jeff, if somewhat unfortunately for Richard, the rumours were false and this was just the latest in the line of celebrity hoax death reports.

However, in Search we noticed something unusual. Sure Michael Jackson was big news, and we were seeing big spikes in traffic, but Jeff Goldblum searches were proving way more popular. In fact, on Friday June 26th, there were over three times as many searches on Jeff Goldblum as on Michael Jackson. So how could this be?

By 8am Michael Jackson was pretty much blanket coverage across all online major news sources but things were strangely quiet around Jeff Goldblum on the major news sites. With the advent of Twitter rumours of this nature have the ability to spread rapidly. Traditional news sources, rightly, need to check their facts before publication; but this leaves a period of time where there is effectively an information void.

As the public looked to answer the question “Is Jeff Goldblum dead?” they turned to Search for the answer. After all, who doesn’t love the thrill of being amongst the first to find out the true story?

Have a great weekend everyone.

Tony Kinner
Search Product Manager, Yahoo!7

Your Flickr on Twitter

July 3rd, 2009 Add comment

This week we launched our Flickr2Twitter integration. Now Flickr members can share their content straight to Twitter!

There are two options to set this up:

  1. Via “upload by email” to use your unique email upload address to post your new Flickr content.
  2. By setting up the “blog this” feature to share your existing Flickr content.

Here’s an example of what a tweeted photo looks like:

Flickr2Twitter example

For more info on setting up Flickr2Twitter check out the following three FAQs:

Tim Nunn
Community Product Manager, Australia

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