While separate search boxes have long been a standard feature of every major browser (except for Chrome), their functionality and intelligence has not gone much beyond autocompleting searches. Yahoo is trying to change this with its Inqisitor plugin for Safari, Firefox, and Internet Explorer. This plugin not only autocompletes your searches, but can also directly display the results of your search as you type, which can potentially safe you quite a few clicks. ]]>
Yahoo acquired Inquisitor this May, but it had only been available for Safari until today.
The default search engine for Inqisitor is obviously Yahoo's own product, but you can also switch to Google as your default search provider. While Flickr and Wikipedia are already built into the plugin by default, Inquisitor also allows you to add shortcuts to any other search engine to its repertoire.
Personalization
In this new version, Yahoo has also started to personalize the results based on your previous search behavior.
In our tests, the personalization seemed to work quite well, though it takes a few searches before the plugin learns enough about your behavior to become useful.
The plugin can now also analyze your bookmarks and include them in your searches. This is useful, but modern browsers like Firefox 3 and Chrome already include this functionality in their own address bars now and can display their results a bit faster than Inquisitor.
In the future, we assume that this functionality is going to become a standard browser feature, but if you are looking to enhance your search box now (and especially if you are using Internet Explorer), this plugin is definitely worth a try.
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