yubnub

June 15, 2005 7:50 PM

Yubnub - a social command line for the web
posted by Staggering Jack (22 comments total)

More info here.
posted by Staggering Jack at 7:58 PM on June 15, 2005

Why?
posted by dg at 8:07 PM on June 15, 2005

I tried a Google search and a Yubnub search on Sun Ra (I dunno, that term - a musician - always seems to point to the pluses and minuses of vaious search engines/databases) and got exactly the same results.

After reading the "More info here" link, I gather that people more technologically advanced than me are impressed. OK.
posted by kozad at 8:15 PM on June 15, 2005

This would be useful if you could use pipes, composite commands and custom flags.
posted by Gyan at 8:28 PM on June 15, 2005

it's a very cool idea, but yeah, pipes are required to make this useful
posted by phrontist at 8:29 PM on June 15, 2005

Pipes. ?? Sorry, I promise never to post on anything remotely technological again. Howza about the latest brouhaha about Thomas Szaz (via Reason and A&L Daily)
posted by kozad at 8:40 PM on June 15, 2005

peacay: you are always good at explaining things - why use this as opposed to Google?
posted by WaterSprite at 8:45 PM on June 15, 2005

aghhh. This post will probably be gone by the time you get to it.
posted by WaterSprite at 8:46 PM on June 15, 2005

WaterSprite - this application appears to be not a search engine per se but rather a command line that uses many different online resources. You can use different commands (the full list is here) to access different information from different websites. For instance, entering "wireless 97201" will come back with wi-fi hotspots in Portland from jwire.com; entering "def libidinous" will give you the definition of that word from answers.com; "am nick horby" will give you the amazon listings for that author. You can also create your own commands.
posted by Staggering Jack at 9:00 PM on June 15, 2005

in firefox it's easy to make those "command line"
keywords from any form textfield on the web..
right click and "add a keyword for this search"..
i use "amazon" - "download" - "images" - "imdb" - "wiki" - all the time..
(actually does the trick to yubnub.com and command-lines it!)
posted by zenzizi at 9:22 PM on June 15, 2005

Exactly zenzini.. in his blog he says he was tired of entering the same keywords on 5 different machines. Now he just goes to nubnub.. or I guess puts it in Firefox like you said.
posted by Jack Karaoke at 12:06 AM on June 16, 2005

Zenzini: Would you mind giving a slightly more detailed explanation of this feature?
posted by Chasuk at 12:43 AM on June 16, 2005

zenzini: That's awesome. I've always constructed my keywords by hand before.
posted by grouse at 1:39 AM on June 16, 2005

This actually kind of rocks; I can see how it could be very useful, but will rock more if it gets integrated into Firefox et al. Obviously we can do this by hand ourselves, but if it was somewhere by default I'm sure its functionality would improve by leaps and bounds. Pipes would also be very, very cool.
posted by bwerdmuller at 2:11 AM on June 16, 2005

Gah, now I've got that song in my head.

Yub nub, eee chop yub nub,
toe meet toe pee chee keene, g'noop dock fling oh ah.
Yah wah, eee chop yah wah,
toe meet toe pee chee keene, g'noop dock fling oh ah
Coat ee chah tu yub nub,
Coat ee chah tu yah wah,
Coat ee chah tu glo wah.
allay loo ta nuv
Glo wah, eee chop glo wah, ya glo wah pee chu nee foam,
ah toot dee awe goon daa.
Coat ee cha tu goo (Yub nub!)
coat ee cha tu doo (Yah wah!)
coat ee cha tu too (ya chaa!)
allay loo tu nuv (3 times)
Glo wah, eee chop glo wah.
Ya glow wah pee chu nee foam,
ah toot dee awe goon daa
allay loo tu nuv!

Looks like an interesting search tool though.
posted by TheophileEscargot at 2:58 AM on June 16, 2005

Chasuk: when you find a search page that you'd like to turn into a keyword search in firefox, right-click on the search box and select "Add a Keyword for this search..." Chose a title and keyword and click ok.

Then you can type the keyword, followed by the search terms directly into the firefox address bar.

E.g. go to the wikipedia site, right-click in the search box on the left, select "Add a keyword for this search..." and give it a title and keyword of "wiki". Now you can type in "wiki chester" (without the quotes) into the address bar to be taken straight to the wiki page on Chester.
posted by blag at 3:28 AM on June 16, 2005

I like the idea, except while looking at the "all commands" page, here, it allows for squatting on useful tags. For example, there's gotta be a better use for "foo." (apologies to Mark Foo's crazy blog.)

I fear the moment that some wiseguy decides to write a script to upload every available dictionary noun that starts with "X" to point to his homemade pr0n. Or even worse, Target gets the same idea...
posted by teatree at 6:47 AM on June 16, 2005

It's things like this that make me feel as if I'm not getting enough out of the internet. Firefox's functionality is so far beyond what I need that, although this seems cool, I can't really tell when I would need to use it. It makes me feel inadequate.
posted by OmieWise at 7:13 AM on June 16, 2005

My thoughts exactly, teatree. As soon as I saw the command listing I though "Spam bait". If it becomes even remotely popular you can be sure it'll happen. Starting with typos.
posted by pemdasi at 10:19 AM on June 16, 2005

I saw this and thought "that's pretty cool". Jon seems to have no shortage of neat little ideas that he executes on, something I lack.

Anyway, it seems the solution that he really needs is a way to sync Firefox profiles so that his addressbar shortcuts are wherever he is. Anyone know of something like this?
posted by therealadam at 2:14 PM on June 16, 2005

Or just run portable Firefox...
posted by Jack Karaoke at 10:20 PM on June 16, 2005

WaterSprite writes "peacay: you are always good at explaining things"
huh?
But if anyone does come back here...gataga social bookmark search page would seem to a potentially very useful addition to the search arsenal.
But I'm otherwise with OmieWise - I'm never sure what I need/want and whether my world will still rock in my corner of ignorance.
posted by peacay at 12:34 PM on June 17, 2005