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. 🙂