Yahoo's Inquisitor Makes Your Browser's Search Box Smarter
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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From a business perspective, I love it.
1. Enhances search experience
2. Potentially allows Y! to see what GOOG users are searching for - valuable targeting information that can be used to enhance performance on their vast stock of display inventory
pk - good point about Y and Google, though sending your data to Yahoo is strictly opt-in only
Isn't that icon a direct theft from Apple's Spotlight?
really? bah - typical Y!
leaving valuable data on the table in some misguided belief that a meaningful number of people will actually notice or care
so much potential, so little courage
Definitely prefer the CyberSearch addon, which works with the awesomebar instead.
Reminds me a lot of ubiquity. Alt+Space, type your keywords, key up key down. No Amazon search support search though. Maybe I haven;t installed the support for Amazon search. There's no bookmark analysis also. But like you said, it's already there in the awesomebar.
Inquisitor is really nice. But if you have a site or blog and you want to add a Live Search just like Inquisitor i suggest you to take a look at Sikbox.
http://sikbox.com
Ditto to Q dub. Cybersearch rocks--why use the search box when you can do it right from the awesome bar? Plus you can customize the keyword search and search using whatever, wikipedia, etc.
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/7931