Yahoo Embeds Search into Web Pages

Yahoo late Wednesday introduced Y!Q, a contextual search feature that will allow developers to embed search results into the content of a Web page. The plug-in will look for keywords from the page it's on and display results from Yahoo's search engine without the need for the user to initiate a search query.

"The fundamental idea was to supplement search queries with context. So instead of having to spend a lot of time searching and assembling all the information you're after, this contextual search technology could incorporate that context to find the most relevant results," Yahoo's Jeremy Zawodny wrote in the Yahoo Search Blog.

The Y!Q development team has hope that publishers will add the service into their Web pages, in turn making searches easier for users. Instead of coming back to the search engine, a user could just use the relevant results provided by the plug-in to jump from site to site.

Y!Q will also be available as an Internet Explorer sidebar (Y!Q DemoBar) and a plug-in for Firefox.

According to Yahoo developers, the name is a play on the word "IQ". Zawodny said that "knowledge often comes from combining information with the relevant context," so the name seemed to fit the application.