One thing is for sure, and it’s that geeks like geeky things. YubNub is one of those sites that ranks very highly for geeks because of the way it makes use of familiar command line syntax. If you have never used DOS or Unix then you might not see the humor that YubNub has to offer by simulating the most popular commands.
To use commands with YubNub you just have to precede your search query with a specified command. For example, there is a man command in Unix that is often followed by the name of the command that you want help with. Similarly, in YubNub if you enter in man g it will give you a description of what the g command will do. In this case g is actually used for a keyword search designated to Google. That means if you type in g CyberNet it would actually pull up the Google search page for “CyberNet.”
Initially this did seem pretty cool because of all the Unix commands it has built-in. If you find yourself becoming more and more addicted to YubNub you should look at getting the search engine integrated into your browser. I was pretty impressed with the list of browsers that they have instructions for integrating with, but then again it is only a search box so it shouldn’t be too difficult to incorporate it into nearly any browser.
The only thing that I’m not sure about with YubNub is that something similar can be done locally (on your own computer) in browsers like Firefox and Opera using keyword searches. I use several keyword searches with my Web browser because I can search the sites I frequently use very quickly. YubNub does allow for the creation of your own commands, such as our cyb command for searching CyberNet, but you’ll find that with 15,000 commands currently in their database it is difficult to find a short unused letter combination that makes sense (we tried cn for our keyword search but it was already taken). For right now Google will remain my default search in Firefox, but maybe someday another search engine will spread its wings to takeover the user-base that Google has built…hey, I said maybe. 
News Source: Download Squad
YubNub is such a time-saver…It’s incredible!
Hi Ryan – Love how you pointed out the humor in YubNub’s unixy commands
Jon
yubnub/ning
Ever heard of Yahoo! open shortcuts? You can set shortcuts like the g for google mentioned. It doesn’t use Unix or DOS commands, though.
[shortcuts.search.yahoo.com]
Interesting…I have never heard of the Yahoo shortcuts! Of course, I don’t visit the Yahoo site much so I’m not sure if they try to publicize it at all.
Open Shortcuts is still in beta, and not advertised. I found it browsing through the list of new Y! innovations at next.yahoo.com. Yahoo! does tend to stay quiet about new features (at least at first) like that sign in seal or yodel.yahoo.com which amazingly isn’t even shown on the “ALL” Yahoo! Services list!
That’s what I’ve got tech blogs like this one and download squad 4
Cool, I didn’t know about next.yahoo.com but I’ve got it bookmarked now. Doesn’t look like they update it too much looking through the feed for the site though. Actually, it says the last time it was updated was May 2006 and the Open Shortcuts was released November of 2005. Then again Google’s Labs page doesn’t get updated very frequently either.
Yah, unfortunately it seems to have been kind of abandoned. Perhaps I shouldn’t have referenced it as a list of “new Y! innovations.”