Patrice's Weblog

Apparently I’m in ranting mode today. Or just unlucky. I’ve used the Yahoo! search for a long time. But today I noticed what might be a bug or a deliberate change. The URLs are no longer communicated in full. See for example “this search result”:http://search.yahoo.com/search?ei=UTF-8&fr=sfp&p=rails%20plugins:

The link which is shown as just “wiki.rubyonrails.com/rails” actually goes to “http://wiki.rubyonrails.com/rails/pages/Plugins”. That’s a big difference and one I care about.

Anybody else having this problem?

Update June 4th: The problem seems to be resolved. Or maybe they are just doing some testing.

A lot of people don’t know one of the nicest features about Firefox: quick search. In Firefox you can turn any bookmark into a search action.

For that just create a new bookmark and add the following properties:

• Name: Whatever you like
• Location: URL of the search but with %s where the query is supposed to be
• Keyword: The shortcut you want for this search

So for example in the screenshot the keyword is tel. Now you can enter “tel kay in basel” to find all Kay’s in Basel. A few shortcuts I have configures are.

Name	Location	Keyword	Example
local.ch phone book	http://tel.local.ch/q/?q=	tel	tel patrice in st. gallen
Yahoo! Search	http://search.yahoo.com/search? ei=UTF-8&fr=sfp&p=%s	s	s Webtuesday
map.search.ch	http://map.search.ch/%s	map	map st.gallen
local.ch “map”	http://tel.local.ch/%s	dir	dir st.gallen linsebuehlstr.

The name and keyword can of course be chosen to fit your needs. And the URLs are of course in one line, I had to break them here a bit because of display issues.

That’s how I search most of my information. Though with a few more shortcuts defined. Somehow I’m able to remember all or most them, strangely enough.

A deep link is a link to a page on a Web site which is not it's homepage. So for example linking to the about me site on my patrice.ch site would be a deep link. So how do you call a link to a section on a page? A deep deep link?

That's what Yahoo! search now does for Wikipedia.

Search for Switzerland and you'll get this:


This result directly links to the subsections "History", "Politics" and "Direct democracy" of the Switzerland article. Now don't ask me what's the algorithm for selecting the subsections, but it's a pretty cool feature.

This is similar to the Google feature where Google will sometimes provide deep links into the site. I never use Google, so the only example I know is when you search for Stanford:


Those links Admission, etc. link to other pages on the Stanford Web sites. That's an intelligent idea as well. Though again, I have no idea what algorithm this links are based on.

(Via Yahoo! search blog and they get bonus points for using coffee as the example.)