« Movie Shortcuts and More | Main | Submitting Site Feeds and other Site Explorer updates »

December 02, 2005

Y!Q in Firefox, and Hacks Galore

Update: The Y!Q Greasemonkey script is now compatible with both Firefox 1.0 and Firefox 1.5. Thanks to everyone for your feedback! The "official" link to the script from the Y!Q site will be updated later this week. In the meantime, simply make sure you have Greasemonkey installed, then right-click here to install the latest version of the Y!Q script.

Back in August, we announced that Y!Q had been integrated into Yahoo! Toolbar for Internet Explorer, enabling Toolbar users to select text on any Web page and get related search results on the spot — the latest embodiment of Y!Q's mission to enable search "at the point of inspiration." Firefox users quickly responded, “Great, but what about us?” Well, we heard you — just install the Y!Q Greasemonkey script, and you'll be able to perform a Y!Q search whenever — and wherever — the spirit moves you.

Also cool is the way the Y!Q Greasemonkey script came about: Jayanth, a former member of the Y!Q team who is now working on another project at Yahoo!, hatched the idea and ran with it on his own, one of many cool hacks coming from the team lately born from the vision and passion of one individual or small teams of like minded developers.

While we're on that subject, the Term Extraction and Contextual Search Web Services (Y!Q's close cousins over at the Yahoo! Developer Network) continue to fuel the imagination of internal and external "hackers" alike. Check out TagCloud.com (the evolution of a cool idea that we blogged about earlier this year), the Local Events Browser, a really slick, internally developed mashup that showcases a whole range of Yahoo! APIs (including the amazing new Yahoo! Maps APIs), and Matt Biddulph's intriguing use of term extraction to identify and visualize relationships expressed in unstructured Web content.

Stay tuned for more exciting news from the Contextual Search team in the coming months. In the meantime, don't be shy — we welcome your thoughts and suggestions for Y!Q, and would love to hear about your innovative uses of our Web Services.

Gray Norton
Product Manager, Contextual Search

Permalink | Bookmark | del.icio.us | digg | Filed In: Search Tips

Comments

The Y!Q Greasemonkey script is not compatible with Firefox 1.5, which was released a few days ago.

Posted by: Phil | December 2, 2005 09:59 AM

Thanks for pointing this out, Phil. I'll look into it right away and report back here.

Posted by: Gray Norton | December 2, 2005 12:11 PM

installed, restarted firefox, even clear the cache, the script still doesn't work, :(

Posted by: webleon | December 2, 2005 12:43 PM

Firefox 1.5 and Greasemonkey 0.6.4 break a lot of existing scripts. Wonder why they chose to break several existing greasemonkey scripts instead of providing backward compatibility.

Posted by: Gayuks | December 2, 2005 02:08 PM

With GM 0.6.4 and FF 1.5 the Error Console shows "Error: gmShowYQIcon is not defined" everytime I select some text.

Posted by: PauTo | December 2, 2005 04:49 PM

Can we have the same button that you are using in FF, in IE too. The on in FF is 3D, it looks cool.

Posted by: 2:11 | December 2, 2005 09:10 PM

Thank you to everyone who has posted. As Gayuks suggested, the problem is due to some Greasemonkey API changes that occurred between 0.5.3 (the latest version that runs in Firefox 1.0.X) and 0.6.4 (the version released a few days ago, which runs in Firefox 1.5).

Jayanth says that he has figured out what he needs to change to make the Y!Q Greasemonkey script work in FF 1.5 / GM 0.6.4, and that he is about halfway done with the changes. We'll aim to have an updated version available sometime next week. In the meantime, those of you who are still running Firefox 1.0.X and GM 0.5.3 should be able to use the Y!Q script without issues.

Thanks again!

Posted by: Gray Norton | December 2, 2005 09:53 PM

Thank you all for trying out the Y!Q Greasemonkey script. I have updated the script to support FF 1.5/GM 0.6.4

Give it a try, and please post here if you still have problems. The updated script is temporarily available at

userpages.umbc.edu/~jmahal1/javascript/yqff.user.js

Posted by: Jayanth | December 3, 2005 11:19 AM

Thanks Jayanth, works perfectly on GM 0.6.4 & FF 1.5 on my G5!

Posted by: jbsnyder | December 3, 2005 12:51 PM

Permanent Link also at userscripts.org

userscripts.org/scripts/source/2271.user.js

Posted by: Jayanth | December 3, 2005 01:08 PM

Since I dont have FF, I thought this was of no use for me.

**NEWSFLASH**

Might sound strange but it works in Opera too :-)

Just use the original GM script from http://yq.search.yahoo.com/publisher/firefox.html

Put it in your UserJS folder and refresh a page. Now select text and voila Y!Q actuator icon will appear!! BUT YOU HAVE TO SHIFT CLICK ON IT, simple click wont work.

AND *for obvious reasons* IT IS NOT FLAWLESS. Based on my initial tests, on websites outside Yahoo network it will only work the first time you use it (refresh the page for second use). On Yahoo's pages the description is best left to the user's visual experience (near flawless, even on multiple use). I hope someone can make it work perfectly for Opera too.

ENJOY :-)

Posted by: An | December 3, 2005 02:25 PM

Great! works on Firefox 1.5, tried Netscape as well works there too.

Posted by: Gayuks | December 3, 2005 04:20 PM

The script is really buggy for me. I am running 1.5 and have a bunch of extensions installed. Maybe they are causing the problem?

Posted by: me | December 3, 2005 09:45 PM

well guys sorry for the multiple posts. May I suggest you do something to check for multiple posts.

Posted by: An | December 4, 2005 01:21 AM

I have FF 1.5 and GM 0.6.4 and the NEW YQ script works great for me

Thank U

Posted by: KOKOJUMBO | December 7, 2005 07:48 AM

Y!Q script does not work (almost) on cyrillic (probably all non-latin1?) sites. Looks like the backend Y!Q code is not charset-aware or something like that. The overlay opens with a mangled query. Need to investigate more.

Posted by: Alex Kapranoff | December 7, 2005 08:08 AM

I have updated the script to allow searching on cyrillic/other sites with double byte characters.

Posted by: Jayanth | December 11, 2005 06:39 PM

The userscripts.org is not responding. Can you place the script someplace else?

Thanks.

Posted by: Sanat Gersappa | May 25, 2006 10:07 PM