Yolink does not rerank search results, but it does rank the information it extracts from the page to determine what may be most useful to the user. On a Yolink results page, the user can click on extracted data to see a more detailed preview without navigating away from the results page.

TigerLogic originally built Yolink as a browser plug-in, but the company changed its strategy to provide an application programming interface (API) that lets publishers and website owners integrate the technology into their own sites. The company offers this service to website owners for a range of prices based on how many searches its users perform each month. The service is free for noncommercial sites with fewer than 2,000 searches monthly, and $1,500 a month for commercial sites with 2,000 to 25,000 searches a month.

There’s a growing sense within the search industry that end users are frustrated with the clutter of results they have to wade through, says Greg Sterling, a senior analyst with Opus Research, a market research firm based in San Francisco, and a contributing editor for the website Search Engine Land. Sterling sees Yolink as an effort to reduce the time it takes to decide which link to click. “They have done a nice job of evolving a complement to search,” he says.

The tool isn’t competition for Google or Bing, Sterling says. Instead, it competes with similar search enhancement efforts. “The challenge for anyone in search is to get attention,” Sterling says, “to create an experience that adds something, and that really goes beyond Google.” He thinks publishers and website owners are much more likely to understand how Yolink could improve the search experience on their sites than end users. Sterling believes Yolink’s API strategy will work much better than offering a browser plug-in, which users would only download if they already understood the likely benefits.