YubNub Offers Command Line Searching

Okay, I call no more resource names that make me think of Warcraft. YubNub! Dabu! Lok'tar! Actually YubNub ( try it at http://www.yubnub.org/ ) has nothing to do with Warcraft and everything to do with "command-line" type searches.

Which I'm all about. I'm an old DOS nerd. C prompts are groovy. And while I readily admit that GUIs have made life a lot easier in some ways, command line interfaces can be way faster.

YubNub gathers together lots of quick search shortcuts into one query box and site. Engines served here include Google, Flickr, Wikipedia, Yahoo, and Amazon.

To get started just check out the Golden Eggs at http://www.yubnub.org/kernel/golden_eggs?args= , which are the commands that have been found to be the most interesting/useful/fun. There are over 300 Golden Eggs. The ones on the first page included quick shortcuts to search Yahoo Groups, a countdown timer, a shortcut to take you directly to a Google Earth address, a command to find recent popular links from del.icio.us, and so on.

This can get kinda overwhelming, so you can search YubNub for shortcuts for a particular service using the ls command. Just enter ls and a keyword and it'll search for that keyword -- ls flickr will give you all the shortcuts related to Flickr.

Once you run a search you're taken directly to the site you've searched and their search results. I ran some Flickr searches that were very useful.

The only problem is going to be remembering all the different available search commands. Michael Fagan, he of FaganFinder, could have an awesome time taking these shortcuts and building resource-specific interfaces for them. If you're feeling equally peppy you could add some shortcuts to YubNub -- try the "create" query to learn how to make commands.

You can get an overview of the service at http://jonaquino.blogspot.com/2005/06/yubnub-my-entry-for-rails-day-24-hour.html and a YubNub blog at http://yubnub.blogspot.com/ .

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