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World Wide Web

Yahoo open shortcuts

This is a superb gift from Yahoo for the new year. This allows you to use the Yahoo search box like a command line via Yahoo Open Shortcuts. Although this is quite similar to the Yubnub tool, I found this very interesting.

In fact, with a small tweak, you can use this from the Firefox address bar.

Here's how you do it:

1. Create a bookmark (Bookmarks->Manage Bookmarks… and then New Bookmark…) with the following entries:

Name: Yahoo
Location: http://search.yahoo.com/search?p=%s&ei=UTF-8&fr=sfp&fl=0&x=wrt
Keyword: yahoo

2. Now enter the following in your search bar:

yahoo !set ljupdate http://www.livejournal.com/update.bml

and press enter.

3. You should get the following message:

Open Shortcuts allows you to use custom keywords to directly search or jumpstart a task on any site from the convenience of a Yahoo! Search box. Please confirm that you would like to add the following Open Shortcut:

* !ljupdate http://www.livejournal.com/update.bml

Press “OK”.

4. Next time you want to update your lj, you just enter:

yahoo !ljupdate

and voila!

This is a simple example I have given. You can try out many things similar to this.

For example, I have created shortcuts to open my bookmark archive, search it. In fact, Yahoo has provided shortcuts to open a particular wikipedia article, compose a mail using Yahoo mail etc.

Some problems though:

* It does not work in AJAXian interfaces or even with POST URL's.
* You cannot have atmost one parameter defined.

Anyways, save time in the new year. 🙂