ChunkIt could make web searching a lot easier. Clicking on link after link, only to discover they're not really what you were looking for, might be a thing of the past.
The basic idea behind ChunkIt, which was created by publicly traded company TigerLogic, is to provide more relevant information about each search result. In a traditional web search, all you get is a brief excerpt from each website in your results. ChunkIt, on the other hand, creates a sidebar next to the search results, showing each "chunk" of the page where your search terms are mentioned. (The actual search results come from existing engines like Google and Yahoo.) So users are a lot more likely to know whether a website is relevant before clicking through. They might even just get the information they need within the chunks.
TigerLogic says ChunkIt could be particularly useful for comparison shopping, academic research, browsing the news, apartment hunting and stock analysis, to name a few examples.
There are other companies approaching the same problem. Yahoo's SearchMonkey initiative, for example, tries to expose more useful data within the normal Yahoo search results. A startup called ManagedQ gives users a visual preview of search results. But the idea of exposing each individual "chunk" seems to be unique -- it gives you a lot of information about the site, but also risks becoming overwhelming.
I played around with ChunkIt a bit this afternoon. It's well designed and easy to use, and I found that it really did speed up my web searches. In general, I dislike toolbars that take up valuable browser real estate -- and once the sidebar pops up, it takes up a lot of space -- but ChunkIt is handy enough that I'll try it out for another couple weeks.
After some private testing, ChunkIt is available to the public tonight.