Select
Computers let you select something you see and do useful things with it. This interaction should be improved and standardized.
Whether it's with a mouse or a finger, when you select text, a little menu should pop up, and its first choices should be: Lookup, Copy, Share.
It's fine if applications want to customize and support additional choices, but those three should always be the first choices. Currently each application has those mixed up differently with other choices, sometimes not visible without an additional action, and sometimes even missing them entirely.
Just like on mobile devices, the menu should pop up immediately on traditional computers without needing a separate action like a right click. That the menu should not interfere with changing the selection.
Lookup
"Lookup" should be customizable, in terms of whether the first screen is a local search, a query to a popular search engine, a dictionary lookup, etc. Other forms of lookup should be linked from that first screen.
For example, selecting the word "customizable" above could show the content of the Wikipedia page for "customizable", with links on the first page there to the dictionary entry, to the Google search, and to the Memex page.
Ideally the first screen would display the page returned by Google's "I'm Feeling Lucky" feature. As the linked page mentions, making this feature more prominent might have revenue implications for Google. As long as we're talking about Google, we should also mention that Google already tries to implement something like what I'm describing. So many Google searches have a dictionary definition and a wikipedia link in their first pages. That would be redundant if operating systems were already presenting that information even more prominently.
Another important possibility for the main lookup page, when the selected text is a hyperlink, would be the actual linked page. For example, the two pages linked above are a lot more useful for understanding how I'm using the terms of the linked text than any of the other sources of information discussed here (at least the time of writing), so should be the primary destination for readers looking them up.
