WebProNews

Safari plug-in gets a makeover, speed boost

Safari users on their preferred Mac hardware platform can pick up an updated version of Inquisitor, a version of Yahoo Search Assist.

It's faster to type 3 or 4 characters than a dozen or more, something that made Yahoo's Search Assist an appealing addition to the company's search service. Start typing and the service suggests possible queries based on what has been typed.

Bringing that functionality into the Safari browser directly came from Yahoo's acquisition of Inquisitor, a Safari plug-in. Inquisitor offered an auto-complete technology on the Mac side that Yahoo could use.

The latest update to it, according to the Yahoo Search blog, makes Inquisitor a prettier and faster plug-in, with a global reach:

To start with we tapped into the Yahoo! Search infrastructure, using the recently announced Yahoo! Search BOSS, our open search web services platform, in order to speed up the search results delivered in Inquisitor. You should notice a significant improvement in the speed of your query results in Yahoo! Search. We also gave Inquisitor a little facelift with a new, refined, yet simple home page (inquisitorx.com) and a cleaner user interface of the Inquisitor client.

"Independent of these core changes is a slicked up visual design that’s less cramped and congested than previous designs. It’s slightly more spacious and important visual elements like the history indicators are more prominent," Inquisitor inventor David Watanabe said on his blog

Yahoo also reached out to international Safari users with the addition of eight more languages to English, natively supported in the Inquisitor plug-in.