Tip Thursday - Hooray For YubNub!

Welcome to Tech Insider’s Tip Thursday, in which we bring you practical computing tips and information.

This week: Command the Web.

Earlier this week, Tech Insider blogged about the emergence of command lines on the Web, such as specialized Google search terms. (Click here for a previous Tip Thursday on Goggling better.)

Web site YubNub (the word means “Hooray” in the Ewok language) takes command line concept even further.

Creator Jonathan Aquino and others have crafted hundreds of Web commands. For example, say you want a random number up to a maximum value of 1,000. Type in random 1000 into the YubNub search box. Suppose you want to search a term in Wikipedia. Type in wp [search term]. Want a Google map? Use gm [location].

You can use YubNub as you would a normal search engine Web page. Even better, you can integrate it into the search engine box in the upper right-hand corner of most browser windows. (YubNub itself defaults to Google when you make a normal search query; it’s truly win-win here.)

Microsoft’s Internet Explorer 7 lets you chose which search engine you want as the search box default. It even has a handy Web page allowing you to directly pick some old standbys, such as Google and Yahoo!. Navigate manually to it by clicking on the arrow next to the magnifying glass icon in the upper right-hand corner. In the drop down menu, choose Find More Providers.

To add YubNub to the choices, paste in this url into Step 3 of the “create your own” box: http://yubnub.org/parser/parse?command=TEST. For Step 4, call it whatever you like. Finally, hit install.

You can then make YubNub your default search provider by going back to the arrow drop down menu, and selecting Change Search Defaults, and choosing appropriately.

Firefox users can make direct use of a plugin.

Other search engine users, see this page for instructions.