Answers Corporation, creator of Answers.com, today began offering its latest webmaster tool, AnswerTips, to websites and blogs.

AnswerTips is a unique feature that provides instant background information when a site's visitor double-clicks a word on an "AnswerTips-enabled" site. Activate an AnswerTip, and without leaving the page, a small information bubble opens, providing definitions, explanations, biographies, historical background and countless other types of relevant information.

The free content in an AnswerTip comes from Answers.com's extensive database of information consisting of four million topics that are licensed from over 120 authoritative reference publications and other resources.

"It's about immediate gratification for anyone reading your blog," says Gil Reich, vice president of product management for Answers Corporation. "Readers get the information they want while remaining engaged in reading your content. Fewer distractions create a better experience on a website, and they save the writer time providing background information on subjects and terminology that his or her audience might be unfamiliar with."

The AnswerTips tool has the ability to crack acronyms, quote stock prices and retrieve biographical information on everyone from rock musicians to political figures. Using patented technology, AnswerTips scans the text surrounding a word to retrieve the most appropriate information. For instance, it can differentiate between "Paris Hilton" and "plaster of Paris" when only the word "Paris" is double-clicked.

Currently, AnswerTips technology has been implemented on Answers.com, WikiAnswers and CBSNews.com, and was beta tested on a few select blogs and websites.

Other free tools from Answers.com include 1-Click Answers (Windows, Mac OS X), which enables AnswerTips within all of your desktop applications, and the Firefox extension (Windows, Mac OS X and Linux).