Search Pad, announced in February, has been in limited testing, but now Yahoo will make it available to people in the U.S., Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Singapore, Malaysia, Philippines, U.K., France, Spain, Italy, Germany, Brazil, Mexico, and Argentina.

Yahoo has refined and broadened the service's features since unveiling it, such as adding ways to share its content, previously limited to e-mail. Search Pad content can now be shared through Yahoo's Delicious social bookmarking service, Facebook and Twitter. However, Search Pad is still considered to be in a beta test period.

Search Pad combines functionality from online notebooks and social bookmarking sites, but since it is a feature of Yahoo's search engine, Search Pad has a very specific purpose, unlike standalone notepad-type Web applications.

Thus, Yahoo doesn't foresee Search Pad replacing Delicious. Rather, Yahoo describes Search Pad as an "online personal research assistant" designed to let people capture information they find for specific projects, such as a major purchase, a vacation or a party.

Yahoo hopes that Search Pad will become an online option for people who save information they find on the Web in word processing files or scraps of paper, and by creating browser bookmarks.