Search feature that hooks into a browser

How about having a 'Search' facility, whereby PageFour lets you select from a list of several search pages, dictionaries and other reference sites, and uses any highlighted text to search on that site. This would be an excellent writing aid. The obvious sites are Google, Wikipedia and various dictionaries, but if you allowed people to define their own they could use specialist sites for their own needs. It would just open the relevant page in the user's default browser.

I use the Opera browser (someone has to) which has exactly this feature - you highlight one or more words on a page, right-click to get the drop-down menu, and under 'Search With' it lets you select from a list of sites. I've set it up to use a few sites I use most (rhymezone.com and flickr.com)

I've not seen this facility within a word processor, and it would make the whole process of looking something up a whole lot easier - no manually switching to the browser, finding the correct site and searching on it. Just highlight a word, right-click and go.

Nick
Friday, February 26th, 2010

A feature very similar to this was put into PageFour over a year ago, but was then removed after testing. While it worked very well, I found that it was never used. It had novelty value, but once that was gone it was simply an extra feature that was taking up space. For this reason it never eve made it as far as a beta version.

Users have their own browsing habits, and they all involve firing up a browser and using a search engine or their own carefully managed bookmarks. Adding a direct link within PageFour to do some of this is encroaching on territory best left to other software.

Darren
Saturday, February 27th, 2010

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