Search Engine Journal

Yahoo Search Open Shortcuts in Beta

On the Yahoo Search Blog, Don Chennavasin and Lalgudi Kannan have announced a new Yahoo Shortcuts tool which lets Yahoo users construct their own customized Yahoo Shortcuts; Open Shortcuts. The whole idea looks like a pretty good way to let Yahoo users not only develop their own ways to save time by simplifing their web and application searches, but its also a good tool for Yahoo to use to measure the needs of its savvy Shortcut using users and apply those ideas to different Yahoo offerings. Here’s a rundown from the YSearchBlog:

Open Shortcuts (beta) are custom keywords that take you directly to a site, a search, or start a task right from the search box. In Unix speak: if the search box is the command-line of the web, shortcuts are aliases.

To use an Open Shortcut, you type ! (exclamation point) followed by the name of the shortcut in the Yahoo! Search box. For example, type: !ebay lamps. This takes you directly to www.ebay.com and searches for lamps.

You can create your own shortcuts to:

* Instantly navigate to any URL on the Internet
* Easily recall common searches on Yahoo!
* Quickly search favorite sites
* Jump start frequently used Internet applications

We already developed a few Open Shortcuts to demonstrate how you might use them:

* Navigation example, type: !my to navigate to “http://my.yahoo.com”
* Common Searches example, type: !wsf to search “weather san francisco” on Yahoo!
* Search example, type: !wiki rozier to search for “rozier” on Wikipedia
* Application example, type: !mail bill@yahoo.com to compose a Y! Mail to “bill@yahoo.com”

To get started, read the instructions for creating an Open Shortcut and play around with ‘em..