New Toolbar Makes Searching Content Easier
ChunkIt is a new search toolbar that bills itself as an x-ray for search. What it does is search your choice of the “big five” search engines, and then displays results on the right and the textual content of the results on the left.
Once the results are loaded, users can click on a paragraph in the left hand side, and it will highlight the paragraph – and then load the full page in the right side.
Highlighted paragraph
Page loaded in the right hand side
I personally find this to be a great tool for search. But one issue for ChunkIt might be copyright. Google has come under fire from newspapers for the issue of copyright when it comes to indexing their pages. Their argument, which has won over some in Europe, is a poor one since Google primarily provides just links to articles.
So, I contacted Brian Cheek at TigerLogic Corporation, the company behind ChunkIt, and here’s what he had to say:
“ChunkIt! is a user-driven device that resides on the client-computer and is not a web service. All processing is handled by and all logic resides on the user’s local computer. ChunkIt! does not persist, store or cache information and does not use a back-end server to perform any of its functionality.”
Smart companies will see the value in ChunkIt’s search tool and not make a fuss over copyright. But expect a few to ignore a good thing when they see it and challenge ChunkIt, but only if and when the tool gets wildly popular.