Yahoo! Shortcuts: Find It Fast
One of the items I work on is
A Yahoo! Shortcut is a quick way to use web search to get to the
information you want, ideally faster than combing through the web
results. Shortcuts results appear automatically when they’re relevant
to your search and link to content on Yahoo! or across the web.
That’s a bit of an awkward description, so let’s get a better
definition and see a shortcut in action.
A web query for “
shortcut” gives The American Heritage Dictionary’s definition of
“shortcut” as “A more direct route than the customary one” in the
Yahoo! Shortcut section (look for the red “Y!” next to it near the top
of the web search results page. The pattern of “define x” can be used
to get definitions, as is pretty obvious, aka apparent, clear, evident
- you can get a whole list of synonyms by using “
obvious“.
Back to the definition of “a more direct route”, there are a number
of patterns or key words you can use to get results from other areas
of Yahoo!. Looking at the tabs across the top of the search box:
- Images: “photos” or “pictures” in a web query will give 4 images
and a link to all Yahoo! Image Search results. Example: “
pictures” (a favorite of my wife) - Video: “video” or “videos” in the query gives a link to all Yahoo!
Video Search results. Example: “
videos” (another favorite of my wife) - Directory: some terms will trigger links to the Yahoo!
Directory’s pages of categorized sites. Example: “ - Local: a pattern of [city] [state] [business name / type] will
give 3 results from Yahoo! Local plus a link to all results. Example:
“
Francisco ca plumbers“ - News: “news” in the query will gives three news headlines via
Yahoo! News and a link to all results. Example: “ - Products: various products or categories of products queries will
give links to Yahoo! Shopping. Example: “
cameras“, “
powershot“
Many people also end up using the Shortcuts for navigation. For
example, “Pool” is
used by many to quickly get to Pool on Yahoo! Games. Some savvy users
just put an “!” on the end web queries that are Yahoo! properties to
be taken straight there. “
to Yahoo! Mail, “
Music, “maps!”
goes to Yahoo! Maps, and so on. (Ok, you smart people will point out
that for maps you can just do a web search for an address and get a
map at the top of the page, such as “
Geary St, San Francisco, CA“).
Lastly, with over 30 shortcuts on web search, there’s plenty of
ways to string them together to get things done faster. My wife will
be headed to Las Vegas with some friends next month (yes, it is a
bachelorette party and no, I’m not invited). She can use shortcuts to
book
her flight, look at prices and reviews for
area or a
specific one, and line up
limo. When it’s time to go, she can
weather,
airport info, see if
on time,
traffic, and see
cheap gas on the way to the airport.
Take a look at the
shortcuts and see how they can help you find things faster. You
can always click on the Shortcuts link on
of the web search results page, or by clicking the About link that’s
at the bottom of every shortcut. For access while on the go, take a
look at the
devices.
Adam Durfee
Product Manager, Yahoo! Search
Adam,
Thanks for that post. In all my presentations, I mention that site. As you know, it used to be a much longer URL. Yahoo does so much more than most people know. I recommend that the site mentioned should be promoted at the main Yahoo site. As well, an easy URL should be used.
Kindest regards,
Ken Leebow
As suggested before i wish this list of shortcut would appear on search.yahoo.com to even make search even easier…i just cannot learn all those shortsut by heart if you see what I mean .
Guillaume -
Do you mean you want a link to the list of Shortcuts, or the actual list itself on the page? Also, besides the links to the Shortcuts list I mentioned in the post, a web search for “shortcut” or “shortcuts” will give a shortcut to the Shortcuts list.
- Adam
In the new version of Safari (2.0 in Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger), the Search Tabs on the Yahoo.com front page to not work and are not shown.
Please fix this bug.
Y shortcut are very useful feature…
we should be able to personalized our own shortcuts
Shortcuts are also an additional navigation for some of us demanding access to certain websites we often visit.
Image results from shortcut should give us a whole page of images. This will be better than just 4 images.