Yahoo plug-in gives brains to browser search

Yahoo's Inquisitor adds new abilities to the search box of Firefox, Internet Explorer, and Safari.

(Credit: CNET News)

Yahoo has released a plug-in called Inquisitor that gives some new horsepower to the search box in Internet Explorer (download), Firefox (download), and Safari (download).

Inquisitor is designed to help people get to information faster, according to a Yahoo Search Blog posting Wednesday. It suggests search terms as people start typing, showing an updated list of possible Web sites below the search box. The results are individualized too: it spotlights Web pages a person has already visited and customizes search results according to previous searches.

In addition, on Internet Explorer, Inquisitor can help retrieve sites a person has bookmarked.

Inquisitor got its start on Apple's Safari, but Yahoo brought it to the top two browsers after acquiring Inquisitor in May.

After the acquisition, Yahoo rebuilt Inquisitor to use its own BOSS (Build Your Own Search Service) technology, the company said.

Inquisitor is an example of the increasing intelligence that Internet companies are trying to build into computers. The search engines from Yahoo, Microsoft, and Google all suggest search queries as users start typing them in, for example. And in the browser, Firefox 3 offers an "awesome bar" that suggests Web sites that a person has bookmarked or already visited, while Google's new Chrome uses its bar to perform online searches directly.

[MaggieRed]

Been using it for a week now and it is very nice and quick. Many times I've only needed two characters and it snags the subject correctly. Works much like Spotlight in OS X.

[bsvols]

just one more bit of proof of the spying-on & recording of eveything we do on OUR computers, with or WITHOUT our permission or knowledge.

[jtkunle]

like the idea but I had to uninstall - if you are like me in FF when you highlight a word, right click and choose search in Google, it's replaced by inquisitor and there was no way to disable it, i still like to search with Google.

[megadupek]

It's a great plug-in. It saves you time for the step of going to the search engine result page. Check it out! Really worth it.

[vradosa]

no comment