• by Gavin O'Malley , April 1, 2005

Continuing its efforts to woo small publishers, Yahoo! Search's Jeremy Zawodny Thursday blogged about several new improvements to Yahoo!'s contextual-based search tool Y!Q, intended to benefit individual Web publishers and developers. Y!Q's code, which analyzes the text of a Web page and shows search results based on its content, has allowed pint-sized Web publishers to add the code to their pages to automatically generate a list of related links since it launched in early February.

"The reason Y!Q is a boon to the smaller guys is because we make it so easy to integrate the features into their sites," Zawodny said in a telephone interview. "We literally allow them to cut and paste the code." The new features that publishers and developers can now deploy will make the search engines on the Web sites more appealing to general users, according to Zawodny. Details about the code are available at http://yq.search.yahoo.com/splash/embed.html.

When Y!Q launched in early February, a Yahoo! spokeswoman described it as "really user-feedback oriented," and expressed hope that users would take advantage of the tool's 'give feedback' option. Yahoo! even put a 'related search' button alongside the normal 'search button' to encourage users to comparison search and figure Y!Q out for themselves.

At the time of the launch, Zawodny explained that Y!Q rests on the theory that "knowledge often comes from combining information with the relevant context." A play on the term IQ, Y!Q allows users to conduct searches based on the content within the Web page they are currently browsing. Y!Q is available at next.yahoo.com as well as on the Yahoo! News test page. Users can install a toolbar for Internet Explorer or Firefox, at which point they can highlight text on a given Web page, and see what happens when they click the "related search" button. Y!Q works on sites other than Yahoo's own, and allows users to add or exclude search terms from those generated automatically simply by unchecking the boxes beside each "context selection box." If users find a desired search result as they search, they can also add it to their query by clicking the "more like this" link next to the result URL. Y!Q then combines users' original search context with the information associated with the selected search result and then adds them to the "context selection boxes."