As of today, the contextual search technology behind Y!Q is available as a Web Service. Fundamentally, this means you can provide some text as context in addition to your explicit query.

This can be very useful in resolving ambiguous queries. For example, if you use our Web Search service to provide web search on your scuba diving web site you might provide a few words or sentences about scuba diving in addition to the user's query. If a user searches for "equipment" with this context as background, they'll find more relevant results than a plain web search for "equipment".

Y!Q also works well on content heavy sites such as news or blogs. Article titles or lead paragraphs often work well as context for focusing queries beyond the explicit keywords.

See the Contextual Web Search documentation for API details and a an example using renaissance art context to get at the right results for a "madonna" search.

As always, let us know what you think. And if you've got feature request, drop 'em on the Wiki.

Jeremy Zawodny
Yahoo! Search Web Services