The service, Search Pad, is similar to Google’s new SearchWiki, which allows users to promote and take notes on search results they find useful and view them later. Ask.com, a search engine owned by IAC/InterActiveCorp, has a “MyStuff” feature that is similar. Google recently stopped new development on a service called Google Notebook that was designed to help users store Web pages for research as well.
Search Pad is trying to distinguish itself from these offerings — which haven’t been widely adopted — by being more seamless and requiring users to do less work. Rather than wait for a user to save a result, it tries to detect if a user is doing research based on their search behavior, like doing similar searches over again. If so, it will ask the user if they want to begin taking notes. If they say yes, it will start pulling all the relevant Web pages they just visited into a digital notepad, which users can add text to, save to their Yahoo accounts, email and print.
via WSJ.com.