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The idea being that someone researching a particular topic on a web page might come across a term or phrase that they wish to investigate more deeply. By highlighting it, Yahoo!'s contextual search will bring up a page of results which are related to the topic.

As the invention of the toolbar put search one step closer to the user, who could access the search engine without having to go to the home page, so by simply highlighting text brings search closer still.

As part of the beta cycle, Yahoo! is offering Y!Q in three flavours. Firstly the tool is offered as a downloadable toolbar (yes, afraid so,

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yet another toolbar) for Internet Explorer or a plug-in for Firefox. Finally an in-page demo is offered over at a test version of Yahoo News. It is also possible for web site owners to drop the code into their own pages to allow contextual search of the topic.

After installing the 'demobar', into IE, web users can highlight a word or term in a web page. By pressing a button on the toolbar, Yahoo! will provide either a page of 'Related' or 'Web' pages.

The difference - says Yahoo! - is that the Related results will be 'automagically refined' by searching not only on the selected term but also on 'related' terms. These terms are listed at the top of the page rather like other 'suggested' search terms that have been around for a while. If you don't like the related terms or think they are skewing your results, you can remove them via checkboxes alongside.

To create an even more sophisticated search query, users can add extra terms into a search box alongside to narrow down the list of results further.

You can find out more about Y!Q at Yahoo!.