Anything Google Can Do, Yahoo! Can Do Better
By
Anders Bylund (TMF Zahrim)
July 7, 2009
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Remember the Google (Nasdaq: GOOG) Notebook tool? It's a handy way to organize your online research notes, republish them as blog posts, and generally massage your Google search results into something digestible. Don't get too used to it -- it's a dead tool walking.
The tool still works, but Google isn't developing it anymore. It's one of many useful Googly tools that met their doom in the past year's belt-tightening efforts.
If you're addicted to Google Notebook, you're going to love what Yahoo! (Nasdaq: YHOO) is doing. And if you've never seen that research tool but use Yahoo! Search on occasion, you might get the bug. Anything Google Notebook could do, Yahoo! Search Pad can do better.
The notepad will be on by default when you use Yahoo!'s search service. It will try to autodetect when you're doing research around a topic, and then start logging your favorite search results and Web clips under that heading. From there's, it's easy to send out links to Facebook or Twitter, or to Yahoo!'s own Del.icio.us bookmarking tool.
It's the "on by default" aspect that tells me that Yahoo! really wants this service to get some traction. "Default" is Microsoft's (Nasdaq: MSFT) favorite marketing tool, after all. IAC's (Nasdaq: IACI) Ask.com has nothing like this note-taking feature, and neither does Bing. Like I said, Google gave up on its Notebook, to the dismay of fellow Fool Tim Beyers. Maybe he'll convert to Yahoo! Search Pad now. Or perhaps there's an app for this on his beloved Apple (Nasdaq: AAPL) iPhone.
If successful, this always-on helper should make Yahoo!'s search pages more sticky. It's an eyeball magnet for millions of college students on the prowl for digestible facts, nicely presented. Yahoo! may have a winner on its hands here, though I suspect that it'll take a few months before we see any results in search traffic shares or ad revenue.
Will Yahoo! succeed where Google swung-and-a-missed? I'd love to hear your thoughts in the comments box below.
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