Every since I stumbled across Firefox's Keyword Searches and Smart Keywords, they have more or less become my default way of deep searching known databases that I use regularly.
Now I don't know if there are equivalents in IE, Opera or Safari, (something worth investigating, perhaps - please leave a comment if you know either way...) but it seem that Yahoo! is offering a similar service with its Open Shortcuts:
Use custom keywords from the convenience of any Yahoo! Search box to* Instantly navigate to any URL on the Internet
* Easily recall common searches on Yahoo!
* Quickly search favorite sites
For example, to search for "battelle search" on amazon, just type: !amazon battelle search
As well as searching 3rd party sites, you can also search a lot of Yahoo! areas too; for example, try using the keywords !audio or !image before your search term(s).
If you have a Yahoo! account, you can define your own personal shortcuts too, which may be handy.
These shortcuts come in two flavours - navigational shortcuts, which will take to a particular URL, and search shortcuts, which allow you to submit a search term to that URL.
Will I start to use these in preference to my Firefox shortcuts? Probably not. Unless, that is, I could easily synch my Firefox shortcuts to my my Yahoo! account...
Posted by ajh59 at April 3, 2006 10:11 AM