Earlier this year Yahoo! posted a video presentation of a new note-taking feature for its search engine called Search Pad. What Search Pad does is provide the internaut with a simple to use tool that helps you manage your search-related activities – track the web pages you visit, automatically detect whether you are researching something online, let you take notes, and so on. If you thought the video was interesting, then you are going to love what comes next: Yahoo! has officially launched Search Pad.

“We are rolling out Search Pad to the public so you can see for yourself how it can help you organize research on the Web. Search Pad helps you track sites and make notes by intelligently detecting user research intent and automatically collecting sites the user 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 organize your notes with the Search Pad interface, which includes drag-and-drop functionality and auto-attributed pasting,” explained Senior Director of Product Management with Yahoo! Search, Tom Chi.

Yahoo! Search Pad has gone live in the following countries: United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Singapore, Malaysia, Philippines, Brazil, Mexico, Argentina, United Kingdom, France, Spain , Italy and Germany.

Let’s take a look at an example in order to understand how Yahoo! Search Pad works – let’s assume you want to travel to Hawaii. While you are online, using Yahoo! Search to gather much needed info about the trip and the trip destination, Search Pad will detect that you are not surfing for pleasure, that you are doing online research and will ask you if you want to take notes. The sites you visit are saved by Search Pad and you are given the possibility to take more notes on the info you’ve found online. You can save your notes via your Yahoo! ID and conveniently access them at a later time. You can also publish your research document to a permanent URL and thus share it with friends and potentially get feedback from them (tips, pointers, ideas, etc).

“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,” added Tom Chi. “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.”