Today a co-worker pointed me towards Yahoo! Search’s Open Shortcuts and I instantly became a fan. With Open Shortcuts you setup shortcuts for other (longer) URLs. For example, I created my first shortcut with the keyword ‘sb’ and it redirects me to http://www.swap-bot.com/. Now I can type ‘!sb’ into Yahoo! Search and instantly be redirected to Swap-bot. The part that makes Open Shortcuts so useful is that I switched my Firefox keyword search URL to ‘http://search.yahoo.com/search?ei=UTF-8&fr=moz2&p=’ and now I can type ‘!sb’ in the URL field in Firefox and again be redirected to Swap-bot.

To change your keyword search URL in Firefox you need to type ‘about:config’ into the URL for Firefox and then filter to ‘keyword.URL’. Then double click on the URL that is currently set and paste the URL snippet from above.

You can set new shortcuts by typing ‘!set shortcut URL‘ (ex: !set eft http://www.travisj.org).

The other really cool feature of Open Shortcuts is that you can include a search parameter by including ‘%s’ as the text placeholder. So, for example, I can create a shortcut to my del.icio.us account and allow for an optional tag search:

!set d http://del.icio.us/travisj/%s

Now, if I type ‘!d php’ I am taken to http://del.icio.us/travisj/php and if I just type ‘!d’ I am taken to my main del.icio.us page.