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

[James Aylett]

sigia-l-bounces at asis.org wrote:
> 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.

Lemur were doing this a few years ago with the AyeAye toolbar [1]. I haven't
had a chance to look at Y!Q, but is it doing much more?

> 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.

I'm pretty sure AyeAye does that, although on downloading it just now it
seems a little unstable on IE 6 (although that's more likely to just be my
machine, to be honest :-). I think it worked just by selecting some text
before hitting the AyeAye button.

> 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?

What I'd prefer to do is to segment the result set from Google clearly, so
that users could decide how to further refine their query once they'd got
some sample results. You could perhaps use the previous page context to
decide the ordering of the segments.

[1] http://www.lemurconsulting.com/ayeayeintro.shtml

Cheers,
James

--
James Aylett
  Chief Technical Architect, Tangozebra
  t 020 7535 9850 f 020 7535 9900
  w http://tangozebra.com/


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