Yahoo's Y!Q Contextual Search Beta

skeptic1 writes "Just days after Microsoft unvieled its new MSN search, Yahoo released a new search tool called Y!Q that allows users to search within the context of the web pages they are currently viewing. It's not the typical textbox input search, and you don't even have to leave the current page you're on to use it. The current release is only the beta version."

Comments

Firefox support

[digitalgimpus]

Yes, Yahoo does support firefox.

But the idea isn't very original. The functionality belongs to Firefox and has been around for quite some time. The default search engine is Google on Firefox.

So yes, by default you get G!Q installed, Yahoo wants you to "upgrade" to Y!Q.

Re:Firefox support

[pHatidic]

The website says the demobar requires windows 95 and better. Does that means it runs on OS X and Linux?

Re:Firefox support

[kaustik]

In firefox, with a default install, you can highlight a phrase, right click, and choose "Search the web for xxx"
It searches Google.

Re:Tinfoil hat time...

[ColdGrits]

So no different from the information Google already collects about you every time you use Google to do a search, then, it seems.

Re:I can't wait until the next party and people...

[Tackhead]

> ...try and verbalize "Y!Q"
>
>or maybe I'll just skip that party.

You think you've got trouble. I was at this party, and the guy was telling me about Y!Q.

Fortunately, I was raised by a !Kung tribe, so I was able to understand it when this guy started talking about Y!Q.

Unfortunately, DNS (which was not invented by the !Kung), I couldn't even guess what the domain name for the Y!Q search engine was supposed to be.

So I thought I'd just google for it. Heh.

I really shoulda skipped that party.

Re:I can't wait until the next party and people...

[Reignking]

Why bang Q? He's omnipotent, that's why.

Read the back story...

[jzawodn]

It's a shame the poster didn't link to the info we posted on the Yahoo! Search blog last night. I think it answers some of the questions coming up here. Then again, this is Slashdot! :-)

Has anyone actually tried it?

[jwakko]

I get the feeling that all the other posters pointing out that firefox already supports "highlight and search" don't get the point. I think the novelty here is that you can highlight huge sections of text, send it to Y!Q, and it will find other pages that are related, given that context.

After playing with it, I can see some how Y!Q is different - I went to a random article on Google news, highlighted an entire paragraph of text, and sent it to Y!Q. It returned a bunch of pages related to that original news article. When you do the same thing with Google search, not surprisingly, it only returns one page.

So, yes, Y!Q does something different. I don't know if it's entirely useful, but it's not entirely redundant, either.

Obligatory Bookmarklet

[hacker]

You can do this with a simple bookmarklet:

javascript:Qr=document.getSelection();if(!Qr){void (Qr=prompt('Keywords...',''))};if(Qr)location.href ='http://google.com/search?query='+'%22'+escape(Qr )+'%22&num=100'

Stick this on your Mozilla/Firefox toolbar (all on one line of course), highlight a word or words, and click it.

It also works if you click it without highlighting text. It will pop up a dialog where you can enter terms you want to search.

Simple!

del.icio.us integration?

[TuringTest]

For all those folks comparing it to Firefox "Search web for selection", this is a very different beast. What Y!Q does is adding metadata to your query, so that only pages are listed which both

1) contain the terms you selected and
2) are related to the metadata of the original website.

I wonder what the results could be if this technology were merged with masive metadata with distributed generation.