Open Shortcuts: Take ‘em with you – VPN or no VPN
| Thursday, May 4th, 2006 | --amit |
So, we released Open Shortcuts a while back. The pitch was the following:
Open Shortcuts are custom keywords that take you directly to a site, a search, or start a task right from the search box. In Unix speak: if the search box is the command-line of the web, shortcuts are aliases.
To use an Open Shortcut, you type ! (exclamation point) followed by the name of the shortcut in the Yahoo! Search box. For example, type: !ebay lamps. This takes you directly to www.ebay.com and searches for lamps.
Fine, this is like Firefox keywords. Um, so... why not keep using Firefox keywords? Do we really need another shortcuts mechanism?? Here's why I think Open Shortcuts are really cool -
First, portability. These shortcuts are available to you wherever you are browsing from, as soon as you login to Yahoo! - at home, at work, at the seedy Internet Cafe, and at your brother-in-law's computer. This itself makes them much more useful then Firefox keywords, which you'd have to set up on each browser (or do some work to sync 'em up somehow)
Second, intranet/firewall-safe/VPN shortcuts. The implementation these fine folks have allows you to create a shortcut even for sites behind a firewall. For example, at Yahoo! I use a shortcut to do a searches on our intranet, especially people search. This doesn't work at home, obviously, but when I'm on the VPN/at work, it's a great time saver!
Third, sharing. It's very easy to share these shortcuts. I'll add a few of my favorites below. Have a few of your own? Share via comments! (hint: fill in the form below, click 'Set', and the resulting URL can be used for sharing)
Here are a few that I use regularly. Click to make them your own.
- Search IMDB (!m)
- Search Rotten Tomatoes (!rt)
- Yahoo! Groups Message list for a certain Group (!yg)
- VersionTracker search for Mac OS X Software (!vt)
- TripAdvisor search for reviews (!ta)
- (Yahoo! only) Backyard search for employees (!yd)
And here's a simple form to create your own (leeched shamelessly):
May 23rd, 2006 at 9:02 am
Awesome stuff! Thanks for all the information. international corner compute or not
January 11th, 2007 at 9:03 pm
[...] While I was poking around to figure out if we have a currency conversion shortcut from our search box, I ran across our entire listing of search shortcuts, which has icons and everything! Did you know you could get traffic reports for various cities? Or real-time sports scores? Reference links for flight status, package locations, patent information? Did you know that we have a search-box calculator, too? And, heck, what about the entire Open Shortcuts system, which can do just about anything if you set it up right? [...]