Yubnub

Having come across it via Eszter on Crooked Timber, I've been messing around with YubNub all week. YubNub calls itself a 'social command line for the internet,' which means essentially that yuo can create all sorts of shortcuts to search various sites direct from your browser, if you see what I mean (Eszter has a better explanation). Anyway, things get to be really fun if you turn your address bar into a command line tool. If, like me, you're on Firefox, just go to about:config and change keyword.URL to http://yubnub.org/parser/parse?command= and you're on your way. I believe you can do that anyway, but this way you don't have to go through the hassle of programming from scratch on each new station you work on.

As things stand, the following are the commands I think I'll be using most of the time (some of which I programmed myself):

amuk: search Amazon UK.

guardian: search the Guardian.

bbc: search the BBC news site.

gmaps: search google maps.

gim: search google images

gs: search google scholar

gma: goto gmail

stanphil: search Standford Encyclopedia of Philosophy

ct: search Crooked Timber

Europa: search any site with domain name eu.int

EU-Europa: search within domain europa.eu.int

I also tried to set up nins to search this blog, but screwed up slightly by not specifying the search string. I think it might get fixed though which will be very handy...

Either way, all these can be used by anyone from the YubNub site or from their search box if they add the YubNub plugin, or, if they set it up, from their Firefox address bar.