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Comment by mooism2 | Hacker News Reader

How about, when someone highlights text on your site, it immediately searches itself and presents the results in the margin? (Without causing the page to reflow or otherwise getting in the way.) Perhaps with links to search Google/Wikipedia/etc as well? Too creepy?

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nytimes.com used to do something like this. It was super annoying.

That stuff is absolute hell for people who compulsively highlight the text they're reading. So are all the sites with links everywhere that pop up a little social networking/other articles windows on highlight.

I use a FF extension called FastestFox which takes highlighted text and automagically pulls a snippet from wikipedia and/or the dictionary (it is smart enough to know which) in addition to offering the option of searching it in one of several configurable search engines. Very helpful when browsing. And works way better than when the NYTimes tried it.

My MSc thesis was on exactly this - adaptive web sites. It's a fascinating research topic.

Did you ever implement anything that we could play with?

sadly not. I had it running on my own blog for a few weeks, collecting data which I then analysed. I'd have loved to have got a nice plugin put together for it all but I didn't get it that far.

Got a distinction for it though! You can read a little about it here: http://www.puremango.co.uk/2009/06/adaptive-web-sites/

the new york times has had something similar to this for years.

you can highlight words and it will show a "question box" that you can click to see more information about the word, google search, etc. it's displayed inline so you don't need to navigate away.

it's a nice idea, but it's terribly annoying.

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