Wednesday, Nov 5, 2008    Text size: 

Tech company Linkool International developed Juice, which works like a super-charged dictionary and encyclopedia tool for casual web surfers.

It works like this:

Juice adds a column to the side of the Firefox browser window. By default, the column is empty, but when a user highlights and drags a word or term on a page, Juice goes to work, grabbing relevant information from Wikipedia, Google News, YouTube and other prominent sites. Juice then displays loads of information about the search term.

Juice also is equipped to make downloading content from the web a lot easier. Users can drag and drop image and movie files into the Juice column to store for later use.

Still in beta-testing, Juice has a few bugs to work out, according to tech writer Jason Kincaid.

"At this point it seems that [Juice's] database is still fairly small, as many searches (even for such common terms as 'Superman') result in a notice that 'Juice has learned a new keyword,'" Kincaid wrote for TechCrunch.com. "Within a few minutes these new terms are added to the database automatically, and the issue will probably be gone within a few weeks of the public beta."

Juice comes in the wake of a recently released plugin from the Mozilla team called Ubiquity, which adds a single field to the Firefox browser that accepts simple commands.

Juice is available for download now.