Yahoo keep rolling out the programs for people to try; last week they launched the official Yahoo! toolbar for Firefox, another sign of that browser's increasing credibility, and last month they released their free desktop search based on top technology from x1.com, the treat there was users basically got x1 for free when it usually costs $74.95.

Between those two, they launched Y!Q Beta, a tool that spreads search.yahoo.com out from that domain, onto sites around the web, into Yahoo news and the browsers of individuals.
The motive behind it (and its official slogan) is to allows users to "search at the point of inspiration".
The goal is good - wouldn't it be much more convenient to be able search from anywhere, without needing to visit a search engine and without the need for typing?

In this way, it takes two of the normal steps out of the process most people would use when searching, namely going to a search site and typing in a query. Y!Q does its best to guess what you're likely to search for, and present the results to you with just one click.

It does this by analyzing the context of what you're reading; with the toolbar installed, this is achieved by sending the text you select with the mouse to yahoo for analysis, with results generated on the fly and sent back to your browser. If you don't install the toolbar, you'll still see it dotted around the Web, because webmasters can embed it directly into their sites.

This is the feature that was most interesting to me, and I've enabled it on this blog, when you click on the "Find more related links" at the end of each post, a query is run on yahoo search and the results display in a pop-up javascript window.
Clicking the link sends the context for the search to Yahoo, in my case it is just the title of the blog post (it's possible to have the search based on the whole page's content with other blogging tools, but it seems to be awkward using Blogger). Because it's just based off my post titles, it's not utilizing the full power of the context search, but it's still fairly useful I think.

It's a similar piece of software in purpose to blinkx contextual search, but with one main advantage - blinkx requires you to download and install an app for it to work, Y!Q has a search plugin for Firefox and an IE toolbar, but anyone with a browser can use it on the pages it's been added to.

blinkx is very good technology, analyzing the contents of whatever window you have open and finding related resources on your hard drive, the Web, blogs and news sites - but despite that, it didn't last very long on my machine.

That was because, despite its premise of making searching easier, it was very alien to my usual way of searching, it presumes to be able to deduce what I want to find based on what I'm reading, or what text I've selected, but it doesn't give me an input field to run a traditional search if I want to, so I'm limited to what blinkx thinks I'm interested in.
It's a simple addition, but a search field was missing from the toolbar when I tried it and so it was uninstalled.

The embedded Y!Q code includes a search field in each of the jscript boxes, but reminds me of blinkx in another way - its power is hidden by default. With blinkx an anonymous toolbar resides at the top of your browser, and you have to click it to see any related resources, similarly with embedded Y!Q all you see is a link to more related links - my feeling is that most people wouldn't be attracted to click either the blinkx toolbar or the Y!Q links because they look too blank.
Something that might make it more appealing for users to click would be an option for webmasters to have the jscript box display when it's moused-over, like IntelliTXT ads.

Another problem I can see with it from a site owners perspective is, there's no way for me to measure whether anyone is using it, and if its taking up space is justified.

It's still in beta status so it will probably be polished and features added (webmasters are promised a smoother method of embedding it on their sites) and some prominent bloggers already have it installed on their sites, but it'll be interesting to see if Y!Q spreads out and is widely used on the Web.

More info:
· Y!Q Search - "Type in what you are looking for the way you think"
· Y!Q: Adding Context to Search
· Inspired: A Conversation with Reiner Kraft - Inventor of Y!Q
· Y!Q Wordpress plugin
· Jeremy Zawodny - Y!Q on my blog
· SearchEngineWatch.com: Yahoo Offers New Y!Q Contextual Search Tool