The Usefulness of the Simple Command Line

its a bit like http://www.scrutinizethis.com/

What country are they from? Good product anyway

What’s Hot Today.com

Firefox includes this feature (and IE2/Maxthon before it ) :
right click on a search field -> “add keyword for this search” an then you can type “yb funny vid” in your adress bar.

Well, it’s not “socialized”, but Firefox has a simplified version of the mentioned command line already built in: http://www.mozilla.org/product.....words.html
On some sites you may have to be tech-savvy to properly place the %s, but it works fine on most e.g. search-engines.

Opera does this straight from the address bar and is customizeable to add any site you want.

The built-in firefox keyword search (as mentioned in #3) does this quite well, and it’s fairly easy to set up. Not the most discoverable though, but damn handy. It also has the benefit that it’s totally customisable. E.g., I have it for searching CPAN and the postgresql docs, and suchlike at work, and things like IMDB at home.

The KDE browser konqueror also comes with many of these built in. In neither case is an external plugin needed.

“Firefox includes this feature (and IE2/Maxthon before it )”

And opera before that. There is a Microsoft Powertoy that is able to add this functionality to IE.

This reminds me of the 24hourdotcom http://24hdc.com/ called Dozomo ( http://dozomo.com/ ). Does the same thing maybe even better but was built back in 2004!

I like Opera’s “create a search” function better. I have all my favorite searches in one drop down box, built in to the browser.

Exactly what I need, and extremely easy to add additional searches (with no limitations).

If aren’t a firefox-loving-uber-geek-code-tweaker and are looking for a good web surfing experience, head over and grab the Opera browser. You won’t be disappointed.

So why would I use Sugarcodes? Any browser worth having (including Mozilla and its successor, Seamonkey; Firefox; Opera; Ephiphany, and probably others) has had this feature built in for years. I don’t get what Sugarcodes adds.

What would very nice to have is to be able to get all unix-y and treat these as a ‘real’ command line with piping…

g beatles | grep lennon

and get back a highlighted page with ‘lennon’ on it.

or maybe

ebay “beatles guitar” ending 30 minutes

to find ebay listings for beatles guitars ending in the next 30 minutes.

or perhaps

am “ringo” | findprice under 14

This one may be unfair because I’m not sure anyone’s paid more than $14 for *any* Ringo product in likely 15 years or more

Perhaps these examples are too basic(?), but the ‘command line’ analogy is pretty weak if it’s just a quicker way to get to someone’s entire page. As people have already pointed out, there’s already many ways to do this in browsers (well, FF and apparently something in opera too).

YubNub can be added to the Firefox search bar, just like IMDb or ebay. Here is the link to add it to your search bar:
javascript:addEngine(’yubnub’,'png’,'Undefined’,'14247′)

I dont think that will show up as a link though, so here is the site with the search results for YubNub, just click where it says YubNub and your all set:
http://mycroft.mozdev.org/down.....orm=Search

As they’ve said, Opera does the same thing in the adress bar.

But as far as I’m concerned, does better because you can create a search engine from any form of a site and create your code too.

I really enjoy this blog. Congratulations.
a Brazilian fan.

“but the ‘command line’ analogy is pretty weak if it’s just a quicker way to get to someone’s entire page” - Michael

I agree…to me search dynamics have no boundaries. If you know exactly what you are looking for and certain keywords have taken you there before then fine…but initial search is a process of refinement which does not eliminate key strokes….

YubNub is great. I think though the best too you can possibly get is a personalised command line. I made one (which I called DavysoNub) which I use all the time. It is a YubNub with fewer commands - but the things I use most have one letter commands.

OK I’ve gotta call bullshit here. My site, LuckyButton, is a way more sane way of doing this. who wants to memorize a bunch of arcane commands? Which computer users use command prompts today? Not the average user, but geeks. OK so I guess yubnub and now sugarcodes are conceptually cool to those of us who use or have used a command line before but…my site with its 26 buttons is just flat-out better at solving this problem.

Yubnub can also easily replace the address bar in Firefox.
Go to about:config
locate the “keyword.URL” parameter
And change the value to “http://yubnub.org/parser/parse?command=” (sans quotes)
Now your address bar is your Yubnub command line.

If sugarcodes has a bookmarklet like YUBNUB, maybe it would be useful, otherwise not worth it for me.
OFFTOPIC and NOT a plug: I am in boston and this local company Tubesnow/Adesso (went live over the weekend) has had full page ads in the Metro (our local free news tabloid) but I have found very little writeups about it othet than it being another all-in-one sharing site (Download necessary). Mashable seems to have something, but their site is down:
http://mashable.com/2007/01/01.....es-of-them. Anyone know the 411?

am i missing why these tools are useful? if i wanted to do a google search, why would i type in sugarcode.com instead of google.com? what’s the use case?
if this thing ever grew large i don’t think youtube, google and co. would appreciate these sites stealing their page views.

its very good.even full word search gave me better results than direct google
search.

Actually YubNub allows a form of piping - try this:
split {url wp alaska} {url lim alaska}

I wonder if anyone has developed a command line interface to these services?

Sorry to plug, but I agree with comment #15. We saw yubnub some time ago and thought to ourselves, “It would be cool if there was a site that did all this and you did not have to be a geek to use it.”

As a side project we build Searchadelic.com Way more searches, but instead of entering some crazy mumbo-jumbo you just select the site you want to search, enter text and hit enter. Added in a cool RSS feeder for news (includes TechCrunch) and “quicklinks” to email, music, bank and networking.

Best part is that it will remember your settings when you return. No passwords or usernames. It was designed to be the ultimate homepage, sort of like netvibes or pageflakes, but super EASY.

Again, hate to mention our site, just think it is way better. I WOULD LOVE FEEDBACK AS WE ARE PREPARING TO MAKE SECOND VERSION. Thanks

Yahoo! Open Shortcuts provides functionality like this in an extremely customizable way from any Yahoo! Search box. It’s been around for quite a while.

http://shortcuts.search.yahoo.com/

It’s actually quite cool.

Also, Google’s new IE toolbar has a button that you can use to turn any search box into a reusable toolbar button/shortcut. It’s very slick and makes it friendlier to use for non-geeks.

If the command line is so great then why was the graphical interface invented and why does absolutely everyone use it instead?

This is a pet gripe of mine. Having to memorize commands and options and switches may be a “powerful” way of computing but it is simply not at all practical in the vast majority of cases. To claim the contrary is just ridiculous geek snobbery.

Matthew Leitz / 22:

Searchadelic is clunky and does not save any time. It reminds of an all-in-one search engine site (mr. sappo or something), but itools.com comes pretty close to what i’m thinking of. Searchadelic may be useful for people like my parents, but all they use is google or (gag!) AOL anyway

Paul: LuckyButton isn’t clunky

There’s an extension for Firefox that lets you easily make a search plugin just by right-clicking in the search field of nearly any web page. A few clicks later, you have the search plugin for your favorite site that doesn’t have one already.

https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/3698/

You can do this in Firefox natively…

Right click a search box and click on “Add Keyword for this search”

Enter a name for the search (Google Images) and a keyword (gi).

Then from the address bar, type ” gi techcrunch “

there’s a lot to be said for simple cli integration …. well done. nice.

This was also a great feature in the little known browser called Galeon (http://galeon.sourceforge.net/). I was a long time user of Galeon since it first started. It had many truely innovative ideas. Yet another victim of founders who couldn’t agree on direction. Those who kept with the project chose to focus on usability vs innovative features.

matthew and chad:

i’m no expert but luckybutton and searchadelic are both clunky. In fact, after trying luckybutton, i find searchadelic slightly more effective since results ore in a different tab/window. Actually, Sidekiq is much more effective. Check it out and you’ll see why: for starters, no need to leave the search page
http://www.sidekiq.com/

Paul,

I can answer any questions you have about TubesNow.com. I work there. What do you want to know?

Paul, Sidekiq looks interesting. I was going to do the same thing but with a header, which is much less intrusive imho. But Sidekiq is really cool, I mean that. I intend to use it. In fact…can you guys add a way to go to a query page based on a URL, such as http://www.sidekiq.com/search?q=foobar ?? I’d like to add Sidekiq to LuckyButton as a supported search engine.

My personnal goal with LuckyButton was to build something that I’d actually be able to get to my top 10-15 sites I search on a daily basis (not sure if they are all proper search engines since some of them don’t do indexing of other sites such as YouTube or Amazon). Specifically, something more useful than Google, which i have had as a homepage since like 99 or something. Well, LuckyButton really is more useful than google TO ME, since I tend to do a ton of google searches and I wouldn’t want anything as my homepage that gets in the way of that.

But anyway this is an interesting little min-space eh. Looks like some serious entrepreneurs here, I just put luckybutton up as a quick tool for myself.

My friend created a completely command-line interface to Amazon, just for fun:
http://lucidcheese.com/ACLI/

Type help to see the commands. It can do everything but actually buy the item, due to restrictions with the Amazon ECS API.
He got views from novelty, but doesn’t see anyone consistently using it.
So is it a fun idea? Yes– but will it catch on..?

Wow. Very very many sites are introduced in comments. But I’ll stick to Yubnub.

Addendum to comment #35 - You can complete the entire purchase using the Amazon CLI