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&sq=india<p>What do you think of this feature?
I obsessively click and highlight text while I read, so it quickly becomes annoying for me.<p>Anyhow, I have already have the answers.com plugin for Firefox, which brings up that overlay on command.
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.<p>This means any accidental doubleclicks are launching new tabs or windows that I don't want.<p>If I want a definition of a word, I have more global, convenient ways of handling that.<p>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 <i>seem</i> useful.
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.<p>If it was an inline popup box in the margin, I would probably like it.
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.<p>You can only do one word at a time. I can look up "republic" and "day", but not the phrase "republic day".<p>The click time-window is long, about 800msecs. Lots of accidental pvs there.
Add the following line to Adblock Plus in Firefox:<p><a href="http://*.nytimes.com/js/common/screen/altClickToSearch.js" rel="nofollow">http://*.nytimes.com/js/common/screen/altClickToSearch.js</a><p>That will fix the problem.
Dislike it with a passion I normally reserve for "Are you sure you wish to close this window" popups and lightboxes.<p>Solutions are to block "altClickToSearch.js" with an adblocker or install a greasemonkey script such as:
<a href="http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/7721" rel="nofollow">http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/7721</a>
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.