The Hyperwords Plugin

Michael Arrington

J. Michael Arrington (born March 13, 1970 in Huntington Beach, California) is a serial entrepreneur and the founder of TechCrunch, a blog covering startups and technology news. Arrington attended Claremont McKenna College (BA Economics, 1992) and Stanford Law School (JD, 1995) and practiced as a corporate and securities lawyer at two law firms: O’Melveny & Myers and Wilson Sonsini Goodrich... → Learn More

Monday, December 26th, 2005

I generally don’t write about Firefox plugins, but Hyperwords is one that’s gotten my attention. Like Om says, it’s a must-have product to aid the browsing experience. And I see a business model here, too.

Hyperwords gives users a number of choices whenever a piece of text is selected. The options simply pop up – right click functionality remains unchanged.

Options include searching various engines, looking up text in wikipedia and dictionary.com, emailing text, searching on Google Maps, translation, and searching on Amazon and other commerce sites. The search and commerce traffic will generate revenue (my guess is a dollar or so per year per active user). The translation service is incredibly useful.

If you’d like to beta test Hyperwords, email beta@gethyperwords.com.

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