While reading on web, we often encounter new words and phrases. It can be places, celebrities, terminologies, recent events and what not. The most common action we perform in Chrome (and with extensions, Firefox) is to highlight the word and Google for it. However, this presents a very important problem which we often undermine.
Searching for the word takes you to a new tab, disrupting your work flow. And very often, we tend to wander away from the given agenda. This is a major productivity killer that is often neglected. Kikin for Chrome, solves this problem in a very elegant way. It just displays the search results within the same window with minimal disruptions.
Kikin for Chrome
To search with Kikin for Chrome is extremely simple. Just click and hold the word or phrase you want to dig for 2 seconds. Kikin will pop the results neatly on the right of your browsing window, without disrupting your flow. To adjust the search term, you can just drag the blue handle to include or exclude words.
Download: Kikin for Google Chrome
Kikin will provide you web results, images, videos, news and maps. Big deal, you say? The interesting part is Kikin’s neat inbuilt image and video viewer. Images are opened within the same browsing window without hijacking you into a different tab. Ditto for Video.
Kikin’s HTML5 map viewer is really handy as well.
Kikin for Chrome also lets you quickly check the meaning of a word. Just click and hold any word and click the definition section in the results on the right to see the dictionary result for the word.
It would be even more awesome if the folks over Kikin used the wiki-page viewer for all external links. For now, all the links pointing towards Wikipedia are opened in a compact viewer within the same browsing window. Any other outbound links are opened in a separate tab. A kill-joy of sorts if you ask me.
Verdict
Kikin for Chrome is an absolute must have if you end up spawning a dozen tabs when you are reading on the web. This is a real gem for research work and some fast information dig-up, without getting lost in tabs. We are eagerly really looking forward to the Firefox version as well.
