I am always on the lookout for easy to use, right-click tools that can be added to a Web browser to speed up research. A recent addition is Liquid Information, formerly known as Hyperwords, that brings together a bunch of tools and is customizable to add your own reference and search resources.
The basic premise is that you run into information on a Web page that, if you highlight it, you can then send to another site or resource. For example, if you come across the latin phrase mutatis mutandis in a legal opinion and you don’t know what it means, you can highlight the phrase, and a small button will appear next to the text if you have Liquid Information installed.
When you move your mouse pointer over the button, a menu pops up with a variety of things to do. You can copy the information (including a link or a citation, similar to the Evernote Web clipper), send it to e-mail or a social media account like Twitter, or send it to a search engine or reference site. If you wanted to know what that phrase meant, you might select the Merriam-Webster dictionary and quickly pull up a definition.
Liquid Information allows you to customize the list of resources, similar to what you might do with your Google or Firefox search bar. You can right-click in a search box on almost any Web site and select the Add to Liquid Information option. Theoretically, it will add this to your list. My initial experience is that it adds it to SOME list but it doesn’t look like my list of resources. Sometimes, when I mouse over the button, I see a completely different set of resources.
I like the default options since they supplement the other research tools I use and it makes it easy to flip information over to another site. If you do a lot of business or competitive intelligence, there are quick links to common sites that show who owns the domain name, what it’s IP address is, and so on. I am going to play around a bit with some of the less frequently used research sites that are in my own portfolio, and see which of them might be good candidates for filling out the Liquid Information menu.
Liquid Information for Chrome
Liquid Information for Firefox
Liquid Information for Safari
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