One of the many slick little features built into Firefox is this: you can highlight a word or phrase, right-click on the highlighted area, and from the pop-up context menu, click the entry that says "Search Google for [whatever you highlighted]." Or, instead of Google, whatever you have set your default search engine to be. The results even present in a new tab, instead of replacing the page you're reading -- exactly as it should be.
The NY Times tries to compete with this. They have recently implemented something that causes a balloon tip-type question mark to appear when you highlight something on a page on that site. (Left-)Clicking the question mark causes a search to be run on their own site, using their own search engine, which appears to be some customized version of Answers.com.
Not only is this annoying in and of itself, it's doubly noxious because it usually doesn't work well at all. Case in point: Timothy Egan has a pretty funny op-ed in today's Times. His name rang a vague bell and I wondered where I'd heard of him. There was no author bio squib at the bottom of the piece, so I went back to the top of the article, and highlighted his name. The NY Times search utility returned zero results. Using the right-click trick to search Google for the same string, of course, produced a bunch. Not to put too fine a point on it, but the first result returned by the Google points to egan.blogs.nytimes.com.
Bad enough that the Times intrudes on the user experience with their shiny new gizmo, but to foist it upon us when it doesn't even work … grrrr.
Probably the decision to roll it out was made by the same person who thought it would be a good idea to hire Bill Kristol, don't you think?
The observant among you will have noticed the non-standard entry in the context menu in the screen shots above that says "Copy HTML." This is what you get if you install the Firefox add-on called CopyCode. Its status is still "experimental" as of this posting, but as far as I can tell, it works fine -- you can copy a block of text and the "Copy HTML" option will retain hyperlinks, text formatting, special line breaks, and so on. I suppose it's possible that the "experimental" status has to do with the add-on not yet having been vetted from a security point of view.
Anyway, that's what it is, if you were wondering.
2 comments:
You should try Ubiquity. It's a Firefox plug in that lets you highlight something in Firefox and then Alt-Space to call up Ubiquity and google or map it. Keeps your hands on the keyboard and away from the mouse which makes it much faster and more productive than right click and search.
That's an interesting looking thing, Brett. Thanks for pointing it out.
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