Contextual retrieval is a critical technique for today's search engines in terms of facilitating queries and returning relevant information. This paper reports on the development and evaluation of a system designed to tackle some of the challenges associated with contextual information retrieval from the World Wide Web (WWW). The developed system has been designed with a view to capturing both implicit and explicit user data which is used to develop a personal contextual profile. Such profiles can be shared across multiple users to create a shared contextual knowledge base. These are used to refine search queries and improve both the search results for a user as well as their search experience. An empirical study has been undertaken to evaluate the system against a number of hypotheses. In this paper, results related to one are presented that support the claim that users can find information more readily using the contextual search system.