Legal Research

Inquisitor: Web Search Enhancement

By Simon Fodden

click to enlargeIt’s been a quiet time here at Slaw as far as technology is concerned. But novelty continues even when we’re turned the other way… Fairly new is Inquisitor, an add-on (or perhaps plugin) for Firefox, Safari and IE. Once installed, Inquisitor offers you support in your navigation toolbar searches — i.e. those you initiate from that little text entry field in the upper right hand corner of your browser. Inquisitor will suggest completed search terms, suggest appropriate websites and make use of your searching history to enhance these functions. You can configure it to give you more or less of all of these aids.

Inquisitor defaults to a Yahoo! search, so if you’re like me and a Google die-hard, you’ll have to go into preferences and change it to Google.

You can also set Inquisitor up so that in its dropdown panel it offers to run your search in alternative sites such as Wikipedia or Flickr — or any other site you plug in via the app preferences. I’ve added a Slaw search (insert: http://www.slaw.ca?=<TERM>) facility.

Inquisitor is not for your artful Boolean quests but might prove helpful for those all too common Google thrashes.

Full post as published by Slaw.ca on October 27, 2008 (boomark / email).