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Yahoo's Y!Q Contextual Search Beta

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the punctuation-equals-edgy-we-swear dept.

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."

3 of 129 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Firefox support by pHatidic · · Score: 5, Funny

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

  2. Read the back story... by jzawodn · · Score: 5, Informative

    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! :-)

    --

    Jeremy D. Zawodny /

  3. Has anyone actually tried it? by jwakko · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.