Yahoo! Cool Thing of the Day

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):

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