Chunk-It Makes Easier Work of Research

As a research wonk, I have a baited breath fascination and anticipation for any web tool that promises to make it easier to find things. I pride myself on the ability to find ANYTHING, and I mean ANYTHING online. If its out there, I can get it -- legally of course.

So when I read about ChunkIt on RWW, I headed right over.

The service is a browser extension for Firefox and MSIE that essentially previews results so you can find exact matches for your needs. Their intro video uses the example of a boombox, a word with multiple meanings. Your browser screen gets split in two, with the official results of your search engine of choice on the right, and the previews in the Chunkit window on the left.

In that left window, you click on the highlighted word in context and the page appears in the right hand side with the paragraph containing the clicked word highlighted. Oh, let me show you with pictures.

1. Search (in this case in Yahoo for Android)



2. Your Yahoo search results appear on the right, and the Chunk-It content chunks on the life.



3. By clicking on a chunk in the left hand column, the page appears on the right with the content area highlighted:



The demo is rather long, but the quality of the service is quite good, so it is worth your time.



Here's what their launch release said about the need for an offering like this:

According to research by Microsoft, roughly a third of Web searches don't get answered correctly on the first search and first click. Usually searchers find the information they want eventually, but that often requires multiple searches or clicks on multiple search results. A main cause for this problem is that a
search result may look promising based on its short description, but instead it turns out to be irrelevant when the actual page is visited, resulting in wasted time. ChunkIt! saves searchers time by exposing the contents of the search results so that they can determine which results best align with their intent. In
addition, by reviewing the contents behind the search results, users may easily identify other keyword combinations to further refine their searches and gain better results. ChunkIt! helps everyone save time, whether you are a shopper, student, teacher, parent or business professional, by making almost any search task on the Web faster and easier, including:

• Online shopping – ChunkIt! shows the keywords users are looking for in item descriptions and product specifications, saving lots of time in online comparison shopping on sites like eBay and Amazon.
• Academic research – ChunkIt! seamlessly previews the valuable contents stored within the links of research sites like LexisNexis, JSTOR, ScienceDirect and Wikipedia.
• Searching news sites – ChunkIt! makes it easy to find stories about the specific topics users are
looking for on news sites with countless links like the Drudge Report, ESPN.com and Perez Hilton.
• Reading blogs – ChunkIt! makes it easy to review which blog posts contain the subject matter users are looking for without needing to read through every single post.
• Classified items and apartment hunting – ChunkIt! lets users dig deep into Craigslist to find classified items and apartments with the features they want in a snap.
• Investment analysis – ChunkIt! takes the hassle out of looking through the countless pages of SEC financial filings.

It's a very effective tool. The offering worked best for me on search sites than on content sites, which RWW found as well.

Give it a try, it's a nice way of improving the effectiveness and efficiency of your research.

Thanks for reading, and don't forget to write.