Power searching with Yahoo! and Firefox shortcuts.
By way of Dare Obasanjo, I learned of Yahoo! Shortcuts.
They seem pretty cool all by themselves, but combined with a browser trick I learned ages ago, I think I'm hooked. Here's the trick (in Firefox anyway): create a bookmark named “Y” with the location “http://search.yahoo.com/search?p=%s” and the keyword “y”.
Now “y your search” in the browser address bar will search Yahoo! for “your search”. And if you put a shortcut in there, it'll do that too. For example, to find the Wikipedia URI for “Firefox” above, I typed “y !wiki firefox” into the address bar. Sweet.
I setup the shortcut “!nwn” to search for pages on my blog, so “y !nwn my search” will find the pages on my blog where I mentioned “my search”. Ok, maybe not useful so much for you, but useful for me sometimes.
Comments:
Why not simply use Firefox keywords? Much easier!
Why bother with the !? To go to Wikipedia's Firefox page in Firefox, I just type "wp firefox". See http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/wlg/5358 for more.
This keymark thing is built into Firefox, too. It's not like you need to install some Greasemonkey extension.
Ehm, ehm -- always amused when Firefox users discovered this feature which was in Konqueror for years (at least since 3.0, but I think it was in 2.*). At least once I can smile to Firefox users :-) So I do not have to go through Yahoo! -- just type wiki:firefox into location bar and that's it.
Matej
Ok. Consensus seems to be that I could just use firefox and be done with it. Fair enough. Maybe I wasn't seeing the forest for the trees, I dunno. Nevermind. Move along. Nothing to see here.
Definitely, no need to go through Y! to use these shorthands, define your own. I have a bunch of single or two letter quick search bookmarks for [g]oogle, [y]ahoo, [w]ikipedia, [p]erl (or python, or PHP), and so on. Very handy: Alt+D g keywords...