I had the opportunity to try out the beta version of Qube v2.0. Made by the people at Qelix, Qube is trying to enter the search arena, but, with the concept of “browserless search.” I know that this has been done before in the past by other companies, but, I can’t recall any recent forays into this space (those who do know some, please let me know).

Qube is a downloadable application that is run in the background and checks to see if you’ve hit any hotkey search combinations, and, it will automatically search the selected items. For example, I can hit Ctrl + Right Mouse Buttom to search the current text that is below my mouse cursor (in this example, the word “gain”). Then, I can bring up Qube’s search window, which will have the web search results for “gain”, and also a dictionary definition (if available).

There are also various options for searching selected text, phrases, or manually entering in searches. The search capture algorithm tries to be as flexible as possible, allowing you to search not only normal text, but window titles, text in GUI buttons, and other elements that you can’t normally highlight in the OS.

Update: Apparently, I missed the QFlyer feature altogether. Whenever you do a search hotkey when Qube is minimized to the system tray, the QFlyer will pop up and show you the search results, as seen below. This is the whole “browserless search” aspect of Qube, allowing you to quickly scan search results within any application. Thanks to Ebrahim for pointing out my oversight.

During my usage, I found their search capturing to be a bit buggy, capturing text that wasn’t right below my cursor, or garbling the selected text before searching. They’re still in beta, so hopefully those issues will be resolved upon release.

Qube currently searches with MSN, and, they have plans to roll out searching with FAST (Yahoo). I’m a little puzzled as to why they are excluding Google from the mix, since Google has by far the majority of the search market (and for good reason). Adding other searches like Wikipedia or Answers.com would be useful as well.

The interface for browsing your results is snappy, allowing you either view each result page in a preview window within the Qube application, or launching your default browser to the search result. Manually typing in the search box will instigate a Google Suggest-like dropdown box that gives you suggestions for your search terms.

There are few more features that haven’t been rolled out yet, which are Siel and AdRoll. Siel is a community driven search, which appears to be in the same space as Swicki. The details of AdRoll are under wraps until it comes out of development. Ebrahim Ezzy, Co-Founder of Qube, has disclosed only this:

All I can say, for the moment, is that we’re not making ads sounds like a feature. AdRoll is unique concept still unattempted. Not link exchange, pop-up network nor a nasty prank. AdRoll aims to enable free, point-based advertising in a proactive manner. It may sound overdramatic at the moment, but we surely know what we mean when we speak of it.

I’ll be looking forward to see exactly what AdRoll is. But, a guess would be that AdRoll involves using the context of searches to help deliver more relevant ads, perhaps integrated with Qube’s interface in a non-interfering way.

Overall, I think that Qube has some good ideas about providing flexible ways to search outside the browser. The only problem for me, is that when I’m doing research, I’m usually already inside a web browser. Opera already has a built-in right click context menu that lets you search with the major search engines. Perhaps other people who aren’t as net heavy as I am would save same time with Qube’s search grabbing features. Also, the QFlyer would save time for anyone in a web browser as well, since it’s a quick pop up window that appears near your search item.

As past history has suggested, the “browserless search” space has yet to produce a killer app. I’ll be checking in on Qube as more features are rolled out, and we’ll see where this goes.

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This entry was posted by James Yu on Thursday, May 25th, 2006 at 12:58 pm and is filed under Qube, Search. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.