One embodiment of the present invention provides a computer-implemented user interface for facilitating a query process. The user interface includes a display mechanism configured to display content to a user. The user interface also includes a selection mechanism configured to allow the user to select at least one displayed area. In addition, the user interface includes a content-analysis mechanism configured to analyze the content in a respective selected displayed area. Moreover, the user interface includes an attribute-retrieval mechanism configured to retrieve one or more attributes associated with the selected displayed area based on the content analysis. The user interface further includes an attribute selection mechanism configured allow the user to select one or more attributes. Furthermore, the user interface includes a query mechanism configured to issue a query based on the selected attributes without the user inputting characters for the query.