Yahoo Offers Y!Q

Yahoo continues its trend of rolling out cool things with Y!Q, which is indeed cool but's going to be a bear to spell. Ack. At any rate you can find it at http://yq.search.yahoo.com/splash/start.html .

What is Y!Q? It's a portable contextual search. By using Y!Q while searching, you can immediately get results relevant to whatever you're looking at. For example, if you go to http://test.news.yahoo.com , you'll see a bunch of "Search Related Info" links. When you click on those, you'll get a new translucent window with Yahoo search results related to the item you've clicked on. (This works fine in Mozilla; in Opera a new window opened)

What do I mean by portable? I mean this isn't something that's just put in a browser toolbar, though it is available in a browser toolbar. You can also get it for Firefox (in three different ways! See http://yq.search.yahoo.com/splash/firefox.html for details), or embed it into your Web page (with some nifty optional controls and very specific control over content, see http://yq.search.yahoo.com/splash/embed.html for details.) I'd do some example embedding here but I can't alter the head of this individual entry without altering the whole template.

If this had just been a toolbar offering I would have been really disappointed. The fact that they've gone a little further with it is great. What I'd like to see next: the ability to embed content pointers from specific Yahoo properties in search results, instead of just Web search results.

Posted to Search Engines-Yahoo | TrackBack