New York Times reference search
Posted in Web Design, Web Development by Armando Alves on December 11, 2007In one of those “duhh” moments, i became aware of a new feature on the New York Times. It happened while reading the priceless piece about Radiohead, and incidentally double-clicking a word. Surprise, surprise, a new window opened with a reference search on the highlighted word.
The feature is powered by Answers.com, although i’d love to see a Wikipedia powered one (perhaps with a Greasemonkey script ?).
In web design, it’s a best practice to gracefully conceal power-user features, and this one is a really useful life hack, specially if you’re used to Firefox’s context menu search. Take note of this simple and effective idea, and if your site has specialized or dense content you can use it as a cross-reference shortcut to provide enhanced interactivity and semantic help.
Booo! Doesn’t work in Safari :)
@Dinis
Shame on them !
But as i said, it’s mostly to power users, the kind of people who use Firefox :)