Smoke and Mirrors

Jeffrey McManus: Open Shortcuts for Yahoo! Search

Somewhat interesting. I like really, really like Firefox better for this type thing. (if you use Firefox but aren’t using keywords for your bookmarks and searches, run don’t walk to figure it out).

Honestly, it wouldn’t matter who implemented this: Yahoo!, Google, or MSN - I wouldn’t use it. When I’m someplace on the web, and I need to look for something, I want to be able to do it immediately. So immediately I use Control-T to open a new Firefox tab and then do whatever shortcut I want. I’m not certain I’m the target audience anyways.

Below I have some examples I use religiously. Here’s the explanation of the fields I use in each example below:

keyword: keyword. This is the keyword I use to activate the bookmark.
location: (hover-over link). Hover over this link, or right-click and click “Copy Shortcut” or “Copy Link Location”, depending on your browser
usage: keyword parameter. This is how you would use this in your Firefox address bar on an example.

1. Pull up an eBay category based on it’s eBay category ID.

keyword: ebaycat
location: (hover-over link)
usage: ebaycat 617

2. Search Triangle.Citysearch.com

keyword: triangle
location: (hover-over link)
usage: triangle mexican

3. Before today, I had one for Google Desktop search… sorry uninstalled now

4. Pull up the About Me page for an eBay seller based on their UserID.

keyword: ebayme
location: (hover-over link)
usage: ebayme ca_rickrover (That’s me)

5. Pull up the eBay “Seller’s other items” list for an ebay seller based on their UserID.

keyword: ebaysell
location: (hover-over link)
usage: ebaysell ca_rickrover

6. Search eBay based on a keyword (Jeff uses this example in his posting…)

keyword: ebay
location: (hover-over link)
usage: ebay ipod

… and a couple others which aren’t parameterized but are more just shortcuts to different places. Why not put things in the toolbar and click on them with the mouse? Speed. Way faster for me to type.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, December 20th, 2005 at 8:24 pm and is filed under Search. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.