Yahoo Offering Open Search Shortcuts

Hmm! Yahoo has in its blog announced a new feature called Open Search Shortcuts. How do these differ from regular search shortcuts? They allow you to go straight to a site and sometimes go straight to a site and run a search. Pretty cool.

The search shortcuts are triggered by starting your query with a !. You can get a list of the ones available by using !list. The ones currently available include one for searching Wikipedia (!wiki keyword) Going straight to Craigslist (!clist), and searching Amazon (!amazon keyword).

Included with the list of shortcuts are the URLs they're triggering so you can easily see what's going on. That's good because in addition to the default Yahoo shortcuts, you can make your own as well. The FAQ/instructions are available at http://search.yahoo.com/osc/help; obviously you'll have to be logged in to take advantage of this feature.

Apparently you're supposed to be able to create the shortcuts from the regular Yahoo search box using a syntax that looks like this:

!set ff http://football.fantasysports.yahoo.com/f2

But I couldn't get this to work. Yahoo also has a form for creating shortcuts at http://search.yahoo.com/osc/create. You'll be prompted to log in if you haven't already. There are two types of shortcuts you can create.

The first kind is really simple; it just takes you directly to a site. So you could specify rb as the shortcut, and enter http://www.researchbuzz.com in the URL box. Then entering !rb while you were logged into Yahoo would take you straight to ResearchBuzz.

The second kind allows you to not only go to a site, but go to a site's search results. Setting these up are a little more difficult, but not too difficult. Let's use the Internet Movie Database as an example. You'll take three steps.

1. Run a query on the resource and note the result URL. In this case I'm going to the IMDB and running a query -- I think I'll run the query zombies. The result URL for a general IMDB query on zombies is http://www.imdb.com/find?q=zombies;s=all. Sometimes the query word will not appear in the result URL; I'm afraid in that case you can't create a search shortcut for 'em.

2. Identify the query word in the result URL. In this case it's easy to see that q=zombies is the query part of the URL. q in a search result URL usually equals query. When I'm running searches to examine the URL, I usually use either very unusual words or long words so the query part pops out -- zombies, gabbagabbahey, peanutbuttercrackers, etc.

3. Exchange Yahoo's code for the query word. Substitute Yahoo's code, %s, for the query word you found in the URL. In this case the URL would now look like this: http://www.imdb.com/find?q=%s;s=all. Plug that into the second shortcut creation form at http://search.yahoo.com/osc/create after thinking up a nickname for it.

Voila! You now have a search shortcut for finding keywords at the Internet Movie Database. If you come up with some other good ones, drop me a note.

Posted to Search Engines-Yahoo | TrackBack