Y!Q

I’ve always been a fan of searching in context.  When we first invested in Gurunet, developer of Answers.com, they had a really cool right click search product.  It required a download and never attained critical mass. But the idea of doing search right from the place where you want to discover something more (or do a "related search") has always made a lot of sense to me.

Well it seems it also makes a lot of sense to Jeff Weiner, the General Manager of Yahoo! Search, and the guy who is doing the most interesting stuff in the search arena right now, in my opinion (do I have to say that?  no, everything on this blog is my opinion).

And so Yahoo! has launced something they called Y!Q, which they describe as "search at the point of inspiration".

I tried to embed a Y!Q search field into this post, but I gave up after about 30 minutes of trying.  Either Typepad doesn’t support the javascript library functionality that you need or I am just lame doing HTML, or both 🙂

This doesn’t strike me as something a lot of people will do.  You need to write HTML code to make this happen.  And I think I can do the same thing with Google (succesfully I might add) as I did on the right column of this blog.

You can also configure Firefox to do Yahoo! searches which I’ve done and that also doesn’t strike me as anything new and different.

The bottom line is while I agree with the idea of doing search "at the moment of inspriration", I don’t see how Y!Q adds a lot to the search experience.

Maybe I am missing something important.  If you think so, please let me know.