I’ve written before many times that one of my biggest soft spots is for timesaving tools. Yahoo has just announced that you can create your own custom Yahoo shortcuts and launch them in the Yahoo search box with the ! in front. For example, by typing !hmm QUERY I can now query MakeYouGoHmm from within Yahoo. This just made the Yahoo search more useful. There are some default searches listed here:

!amazon
!audio
!clist
!ebay
!flickr
!image
!mail
!mw
!my
!mysp
!news
!note
!php
!shop
!travel
!video
!wiki
!wsf

Of course shortcuts are already possible — and more powerful — out of the browser and inside the MSN toolbar searchbar or by using something like ActiveWords. Also, there are other shortcut sites/tools (yubnub anyone?) out there, so Yahoo’s engineer Kannan that “came up with the idea” gets a rates a 1 out of 5 on the innovation scale.

Create your own shortcuts from the Yahoo search bar
Use the following format:

!set SHORTCUT CODE

So to create a basic Google search shortcut using “g” for Google I’d use the following code:

I made more shortcuts and here is the code used. Feel free to copy the code and roll your own, too bad we couldn’t share these easier with others, now that would have been something a little more innovative, Yahoo:

!hmm MakeYouGoHmm search - !set http://www.makeyougohmm.com/index.phtml?s=%s
!fb Feedster blog search - !set fb http://www.feedster.com/search.php?hl=en&ie=UTF-8&q=%s&sort=date
!g Google search - (see above)
!gi Google image search - !set gi http://images.google.com/images?hl=en&q=%s
!gb Google blog search - !set gb http://www.google.com/blogsearch?hl=en&q=%s
!t Technorati search - !set t http://www.technorati.com/search/%s
!tb Technorati blogsearch !set tb http://www.technorati.com/blogs/%s

Did this post make you go hmm?

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