

Ask YC: What do you think of this NY Times feature - kashif

This is a feature I stumbled on ...<p>Goto a full page article on nytimes.com article and <i>double click</i> a word(not hyper linked)<p>Try this one..<p>http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/09/world/europe/09delhi.html?scp=2&#38;sq=india<p>What do you think of this feature?
======
danielha
I obsessively click and highlight text while I read, so it quickly becomes
annoying for me.

Anyhow, I have already have the answers.com plugin for Firefox, which brings
up that overlay on command.

~~~
mattmaroon
Me too. I thought I was insane for doing that. Glad to hear at least someone
else is.

~~~
jkush
There was a thread on reddit a while back. I think us click and highlighters
are in good company.

<http://reddit.com/info/64ek1/comments/>

~~~
eru
I use ctrl-A.

~~~
jkush
Heh. Don't know if that was sarcastic, but in case you aren't: when I _want_
to highlight something for copy and paste, then yes, I use CTRL-A.

What we're talking about is an almost obsessive compulsive clicking and
highlighting of words while we read.

------
vasudeva
Annoying and redundant. I often find myself clicking on a page to either force
focus to that window, or to select text to act as a highlight so I can find my
place easily later on.

This means any accidental doubleclicks are launching new tabs or windows that
I don't want.

If I want a definition of a word, I have more global, convenient ways of
handling that.

Now, if instead double-clicking did something like spawn a topic search
through NYT or news.google.com or something, without the hassle of underlining
every word, I can imagine that would at least _seem_ useful.

------
whacked_new
I dislike it, very much, mostly because it is intrusive (pop up). Its behavior
violates the principle of least surprise, since most websites and applications
don't do that.

If it was an inline popup box in the margin, I would probably like it.

------
aristus
An interesting idea, stupidly mangled by the corporate process. If they manage
to make it useful that would be nice. But I suspect it's just ploy to boost
pageviews, and will be measured solely on that.

You can only do one word at a time. I can look up "republic" and "day", but
not the phrase "republic day".

The click time-window is long, about 800msecs. Lots of accidental pvs there.

------
Alex3917
Add the following line to Adblock Plus in Firefox:

<http://*.nytimes.com/js/common/screen/altClickToSearch.js>

That will fix the problem.

------
danw
Dislike it with a passion I normally reserve for "Are you sure you wish to
close this window" popups and lightboxes.

Solutions are to block "altClickToSearch.js" with an adblocker or install a
greasemonkey script such as: <http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/7721>

------
daniel-cussen
It's a terrible idea. I bet someone had to come up with a feature to justify
their IT job and created this monster. This, along with the PR "business"
articles in the fashion section, made me lose the most respect for nytimes.

------
jakewolf
A browser based vocab tool is something I'd be interested in using especially
for more literary sites.

~~~
paulgb
I was looking for the same thing yesterday (if I understand what you mean
about a vocab tool). I settled on the answers.com extension
(<http://www.answers.com/main/firefox_plugins.jsp>). I didn't look around very
hard so maybe there is something better out there.

------
dcurtis
Command-control-d is much better in Mac OS X.

