While companies struggle with keeping costs down during the recession, programmers tired of being bound by social networks and other walled destination sites will have their heads down building tools to make our Web browsing experience more intuitive and efficient.
Welcome to the contextual Web, a world in which technologies sit in, bolt on or plug into the browser or Web site, monitor a Web surfer's activity and make recommendations or draw connections for a user who might otherwise be oblivious to them.

This is a world where Yahoo is already dabbling with efforts such as SearchMonkey, and it is an area Google may look to play in through its Chrome Web browser. Yet Google has been strangely hush-hush about its Web browser extension plans.

Cutting-edge startups have not been so quiet. Programmers such as Alex Iskold, founder and CEO of Adaptive Blue, are helping to foster this vision of the contextual Web. Iskold told eWEEK that in the contextual Web, users will do a Google search once and receive additional information from a browser or Web site. Iskold explained:

After search, the computer would understand what you're looking at and what you're intent might be. Let's say I'm searching for a book. A lot of people will just Google the book name and they would end up on Amazon. Once you end up on Amazon, what if you wanted to do more? Look at the book, find more books by the author, comparison shop, share with friends, there is a limited set of actions to what you would do. At some point in the future, we will do less searching. The circumstance when you've arrived at the page and then you said now I have to go to Google and do more searching -- that use case is going to be reduced.