Today, Yahoo launched a new service called “Open Shortcuts”. [via lifehacker].
In a nutshell, it allows you to define your own shortcuts for the searchbox, complete with optional parameters. So, for example, !mail foo@bar.com sends e-mail to foo@bar.com. (It fires up Yahoo web mail). All those shortcuts start with an exclamation mark, presumably to ease the work for the search engine. Try entering !list for a list of the default shortcuts - anything else will require you to sign in.
Overall, I consider this good, if quite ironic - we spent 20 years maturing our GUIs, just to have web browsers bring a single text field onto the screen, allowing us to type in commands. (For an eloquent essay on its merits, download Neal Stephenson’s “In the beginning was the command line”. Or buy it on Amazon
Now, Google has tried similar things before. There’s the unit conversion, there’s the calculator and there are, I am sure, quite a few other things where Google is trying to guess what you do. That’s the point, though - Google is trying to divine your intentions.
The difference is that Yahoo lets you define your own shortcuts. This continues a recent trend where Yahoo is way more in touch with the open and user-defined nature of the web than Google is. (I’m just saying del.icio.us and flickr. Not to mention MyWeb2.0).
I am seriously considering switching my default search page to Yahoo - results have been comparable lately, and this feature is just nifty! Or would that be !nifty ??
Tags: web, search, productivity