inquisitor.pngarrow Mac Mac only arrow
Yahoo has made an acquisition today that will probably catch some Mac users off guard. They bought the rights to a Safari add-on called Inquisitor, which is pictured to the right.

Once installed Inquisitor enhances the search box in Safari so that it will pull in live results as you type. The results are prioritized based upon the user’s search history, and it’s also able to auto-complete the results as you type them.

I tried out Inquisitor, and I can definitely attest to its awesomeness. It’s very sleek, and currently lets you pick between Yahoo or Google as the default search engine to be used for the live results. It’s pretty obvious that because Yahoo just acquired the application that it would be the default option, and it is.

After setting up Inquisitor you can change the default search engine to Google (if you want). This is done by opening Safari’s preferences, and then selecting the Search tab as seen below. Then hit the drop-down menu for a list of available search engines:

inquisitor options.png

After getting our Mac’s I tried using only Safari for a few hours, but there were some things that I just couldn’t grow accustomed to. This add-on makes me really want to start using Safari again, but maybe I’ll just keep my fingers crossed that some Firefox developer will create an extension that works (and looks) as good as this does.

In case you’re wondering the developer of the add-on will continue to be the one who works on it, but he’s not joining Yahoo as an employee.

Inquisitor Homepage [via Inquisitor Blog]

  1. I’m sure with the new bookmarks & history backend of Firefox 3 (Places), this will be possible for an extension for Firefox too. Let’s see what the developers will come up with :) Looks great for sure.

  2. Change wrote:
    I’m sure with the new bookmarks & history backend of Firefox 3 (Places), this will be possible for an extension for Firefox too. Let’s see what the developers will come up with :) Looks great for sure.

    I’m keeping my fingers crossed! There’s just no way I could use Safari on a regular basis even with this add-on. I’d miss my bookmarks sidebar too much.