What do you do if you are a search engine company with few search presences you are testing and each presence has its own toolbar and people are commenting about this fact? In the case of Yahoo, you can consolidate these features onto the flagship toolbar and release an update, which is exactly what Yahoo has done.
When Yahoo launched Y!Q, the company’s contextual search service, they also included the Y!Q Demobar. The Y!Q toolbar gave users the capabilities of highlighting a portion of text (users can highlight an entire article if they choose) and trigger a contextual search.
While the usability of such the Y!Q Demobar was not question, the fact that users had to download two toolbars to get all of Yahoo’s available search features was, according to the Yahoo Search blog. Because of the feedback concerning multiple toolbars, Yahoo has released an update to their main toolbar, which now features the capabilities of Y!Q. When users highlight a portion of text and select the search option, which is apart of the actuator button that appears when text is selected.
Y!Q is not the only feature that’s been added to the latest Yahoo Toolbar version (and the toolbar is not the only place Y!Q capabilities have been added either). Other toolbar additions include the ability to save query results to MyWeb, Yahoo’s personalized search feature; as well as controls for the Y! Music Engine.
The Y!Q feature has also been added to Yahoo’s instant messenger client. When Yahoo Messenger users activate the LiveWords feature, certain words from the conversation are underlined. When users click these underlined words, they trigger a search of the underlined text. Users can also highlight IM text and generate Y!Q searches using this method as well.
If you would like to update your Yahoo toolbar in order to use these features, you can do so here.
Chris Richardson is a search engine writer and editor for murdok. Visit murdok for the latest search news.
