New Yahoo Feature - YQ

Contextual Search gizmo

[michael heraghty]

[yq.search.yahoo.com...]

Yahoo is making a meal of the "first-of-its-kind" claim (see [next.yahoo.com...] ).

Y!Q is the first-of-its-kind contextual search technology that analyzes the contents of the Web page you're viewing and then gives you a list of search results directly related to what you're reading. (Learn more about how Y!Q works.)

[edited by: Brett_Tabke at 12:06 pm (utc) on Feb. 3, 2005]
[edit reason] added quote. [/edit]

[Brett_Tabke]

It sounds interesting, but is this not "related searches" that Google already has on the page?

The description of this thing on the page is fairly difficult to understand. How is the average user going to understand this stuff?

Or is this like the a Teoma "drill down" list?

Either way, it appears to require YATB (yet another tool bar) to work.

[Imaster]

How is this different than the technology that Google uses to serve related search results pages on GMail messages? Doesn't it sound similar, the only difference being that Google does it for a email message and Y! claims to be doing it for any webpage on the net?

Or is it a more robust version of the "related pages" feature which Google currently has?

Or am I completely missing the capabilities of this new feature?

[Clark]

Even Alexa offers something similar. I tried it out on Yahoo! News and it didn't work too well and when it did work, it wasn't too impressive. It's a bit cute, but nothing that will catch on.

[Stefan]

From a news article I read on it:

The company, which has released the service in a test format, said it is making the coding available to Web designers to embed in their sites, so that the tool can search their pages.

Anyone got any idea of what that is or what it does exactly?

<edit>Sorry... reading up on it now in Y.</edit>

[ThatAdamGuy]

I consider myself pretty geeky... but after spending about 15 minutes trying to slog through the explanatory texts of the new Y! tool/service AND trying it out, I still have no better understanding of it than when I started.

And, let's face it, if WW'ers like us are confused, how's Y!'s core audience gonna react?

Chalk another one up for Google. For all the company's faults, at least most of their new services are pretty straightforward and easy to grasp from the get-go :).

[HughMungus]

Just tried it. I don't understand why you have to define the information twice. I thought the first div tag class would define what text I wanted to use in a contextual search but it appears that it has to then be repeated in the form (?)

[weeks]

I thought it was me. I could figure it out.
Oh well.

[bakedjake]

Oh this thing rocks. It took me 5 days to get how to use this, but this thing is really useful!

It's a CSS popup with related searches for key terms in your document.

You define a "context" (like a div snippet about a current event or something), put a form button on it, and it gives you search results for that "context".

Look at an example here: [test.news.yahoo.com...] - Those "search related info" buttons takes the text from the proceding news div and does a related search on it.

Sweet Yahoo. That's really cool. I can see using this all over in internal documents.

No Toolbar Required

[geek2be]

They could have gone one step futher and add option to chat with people surfing similar content. [chatnsearch.com...] has a Firefox extension that does similar thing.

[ByronM]

That is actually pretty sweet.

I'm going to try this out in Drupal as a dropin for the contextual link manager plugin to allow Y! searches contextually.

[thaedge]

Yes but the links are off to someone else's site. If your a content only site, this is a grand idea - helps users find similar sites or more data on the topic.

If you are any other type of site, why would you display SERPS on top of your content that leads to another site?

If I am selling Blue Widgets, and I pay or optimize for those eyeballs, why let them leave?

Unless I missed something, I dont see a use for this aside from simple content, hobby, and blog sites.