Yahoo Contextual Search

Yahoo, the underdog, is trying out in beta a contextual search tool called Y!Q (“IQ” — get it?). The notion, so far as I understand it, is that the search engine is able to discern from a passage of web page text that you highlight what the key terms are and to let you search for a particular term or set of terms within that context.

It seems that there are two ways to use this tool. One is, as a web site manager, to load the JavaScript on your pages and thereby cause little icons to appear next to critical terms (“LiveWords”) that might frame the context of the content of the page. Go to Yahoo News and click on any story to see this in action. The other way to use this tool is to install it on your own browser, either as a toolbar in IE or as a Greasemonkey script in Firefox. Once installed, at least in Firefox, which is my browser of choice, any highlighted text (on any web page) causes the Y!Q icon to appear; clicking on that throws a popup window (or a JavaScript window in IE) with results based on the selected passage and a search box to let you refine your search within the context.

I’m not persuaded that this is a truly useful tool — yet. But the idea is interesting and it is worth playing around with to see if it can be modified to do some special tasks.