Apr 28th Hack day at work!
A preliminary demo for my hack is already installed on this site. My hack was to take any text selections a user makes and allow them to search Y! Shopping for related products. You can see it at work by selecting any word or words on this page and then by clicking the little blue box that comes up next to it. Although you might find an obvious shopping term such as nikon digital cameras much more relavant.
This can be improved very easily. For example, instead of only searching Y! Shopping, the initial box can be a drop down menu populated with results from a text analysis tool. Then the user can perform a web/news/product search by following the corresponding links.
A key benefit to this implementation, any web publisher only needs to include a single (two at the moment) javascript reference in their header to receive this functionality. They don’t have to link terms by hand, or do any backend work to support this. They get better user experience and a richer webpage essentially for free.