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.
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.
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.
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.
Since launching SearchMonkey last May and Yahoo! Search BOSS last July, the global Yahoo! Search team has reached some impressive milestones: BOSS is now serving 30 million queries a day, and SearchMonkey is celebrating its first anniversary with 70 million enhanced results viewed daily.
Along the way, we’ve made great headway in opening up Yahoo! Search by accelerating the adoption of structured data across the Web and empowering developers to innovate in search. Here’s a look at some of the important initiatives we’ve accomplished with SearchMonkey and BOSS.
With BOSS, we’ve made key updates including allowing developers to monetise through third-party platforms and enabling access to SearchMonkey structured data. The BOSS API is on track to hit 1 billion monthly queries in May, without even including the volume from traditional Yahoo! Search syndication. This is more than three times the queries served just six months ago, and ranks ahead of the combined searches on Ask and Facebook, and just behind Microsoft1.
With SearchMonkey, we’ve launched numerous valuable initiatives over the last year. In Australia we have turned applications default-on for results from sites such as Wikipedia and Facebook to improve reference and social searches. We‘ll also be enabling publishers to more easily display enhanced results for video, games, and documents. Additionally, as a part of efforts to promote a more meaningful understanding of the Web, Yahoo! Search continued to support semantic tech gatherings such as VoCamp.
SearchMonkey is currently live in Australia along with 22 other markets around the world, reaching some significant global milestones:
70 million enhanced SearchMonkey results are viewed by users every day.
Site owners have seen a more than 15% increase in the click-through rates of their SearchMonkey search results when tested against non-SearchMonkey results.
200 people enter the developer tool and start creating an application each day.
Over 15,000 developers have registered to build applications, with over 70 applications available to Australians for customising results for sites such as Twitter, MySpace and flickr.
RDFa structured data driven by SearchMonkey has increased by 413% since October, 2008.
In the coming months with SearchMonkey, we will be driving efforts toward increasing structured data on the Web, more uses for existing structured data, and easier ways to display enhanced results for some data types. We’ll throw in a little fun, too, with some open customization of the Yahoo! Search results page. With BOSS, you can look forward to more specialised searches that will help consumers reach their content more easily than ever
We want to extend our thanks to the developer communities within both SearchMonkey and BOSS and to partners including Facebook, LinkedIn, for joining us in our efforts to make search richer and more open, and for helping us reach these milestones. We’re pleased with what we’ve done in this past year. More importantly, we’re excited about and focused on where we’re taking you next. 1comScore qSearch April 2009. Queries delivered via the BOSS API and served by Yahoo! partners are not counted as Yahoo! Search queries by comScore or other metrics providers.
When I first arrived in Australia I was given a prepaid very low tech Nokia, while the phone was nothing to look at it made up 10-fold in functionality, it made calls, sent texts, and even had a torch… quite handy when you don’t know where you are in the dark. I also enjoyed the retro chic that came with it.
Anyway two weeks ago I decided it was about time I got with the program and despite the ridiculous data charges in this country I went out and bought myself an iPhone. There’s not a lot of bad things I can say about the iPhone, unwrapping the beast felt like a guilty pleasure, the lack of instructions confused me for 10 minutes, my chubby fingers were not nimble enough for the keyboard and it didn’t come with a torch, although apparently there’s an app for that.
There’s plenty of good things to say about the iPhone but today I’m going to concentrate on how well integrated the iPhone is with Yahoo! For starters the phones default apps include stocks and weather from Yahoo! and search was defaulted to Yahoo! I’ve since synced my Yahoo! Address book with the iPhone, push my Yahoo! Mail accounts in perfect unison, downloaded the Inquisitor search application and have fallen in love with the Yahoo! Messenger app.
The Yahoo! Messenger app is pretty much perfect, the design and functionality is very much like the latest download version and has all our favourite emoticons. I actually prefer the way each message is displayed on the iPhone version and its ingenious to be able to take a photo and instantly share that with your messenger friends so cool B-) I’d tweak it to allow interoperability with MSN Messenger and maybe free voice over wifi/3G and it’s a crying shame that the SMS business model in Australia doesn’t allow us to offer free texts to our Aussie users.
This video provides a great demonstration of the application take a look, download the app from iTunes and let us know what you think
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