[Sigia-l] Y!Q - Just-in-time search

[Listera]

Andrew Boyd:

> Searches are usually conducted at the point of inspiration - if I was
> not really inspired, I would have to be a pretty sad individual to
> conduct a search using Yahoo.

Now, now, do you have any commercial interest in Google? :-)

Y!Q essentially parameterizes your query for you. It parses the page you are
looking at and extracts (what it thinks) prominent words. It then performs
the search based on those words, hence the 'context'. There's a banner at
the top of the result-set that says: "Results automagically refined by
[yahoo] using the following terms [x] Word 1 [x] Word 2" and so on. Users
can further tweak it by checking some of those words off/on.

This *can* help the class of users who have difficulty forming their search
parameters. However, as you point out, context detection as
claimed/insinuated here is very difficult in real life, mostly because a
page may or may not be the sum of its parts. Varied content on the same page
would pose especially difficult problems.

On the other hand, if you test it on a very large userbase chances are
pretty good that, on average, most pages would likely contain parametrizable
content and, therefore, fairly contextual result-sets. I'd be interested to
hear from Yahoo people if this is corroborated in user tests.

It would also be interesting to be able to somehow limit context to a word,
paragraph, text selection or the whole page easily via a contextual menu.
Nearly a decade into the web age, people still have major problems in
forming Boolean searches and deconstructing their intention into phrases and
conventions SEs can work with.

Let me put it to you this way: when you enter a search word into the Google
search box on your browser bar, would it help you if it trimmed the
result-set in the context of the page you are currently on? Would you ever
make it the default behavior, considering users' difficulty in parametrizing
search terms? 

Ziya
Nullius in Verba