MattMaroon.com

A friend introduced me to YubNub today. At first I installed the plugin into Firefox and thought it was the greatest thing in the world. Want to search Google Images for Britney Spears? Just type “gim britney spears”. Amazon for a screwdriver? “am screwdriver”. It is, as it says, a command line for the web.

But I quickly ran into a couple usability problems. For one, there’s no customizability. The command “a” takes me to answers.com. I never, ever want to go to that site. Who the hell does? It’s like Wikipedia for retards. I do, however, visit Amazon daily. According to compete.com Amazon has over 4 times the traffic of Answers. Shouldn’t “a” default there?

Second, anyone can create a command, presumably as long as the command’s key combo doesn’t exist. This is both good (in that pretty much any site you’d want to use is covered) and bad in that a lot of three letter words are taken. That’s a problem because the default command, if you don’t use one, is to Google for whatever you type into the box. That’s good because 95% of the time you use that box, it’s for Google.

But after installing YubNub weird things start happening. For instance type in “Rad Rails”. Turns out rad is the command for the weather channel. So you now have to type in “g rad rails” just to Google for it. In maybe twenty queries something like this happened to me three times, and since I hadn’t wanted to query anything but Google on any of them, and each time cost me a few clicks, it was a large amount of wasted effort.

The biggest problem though is that it’s useless. Most of the things you’d search for you can just find easily on Google anyway. For instance when my friend Russ was showing it to us, he wanted to demonstrate it by searching IMDB for Last Action Hero, which was just “i last action hero”. But if you just Google for Last Action Hero what’s number 1 on the list? The IMDB entry. I imagine that’s true for almost any movie you’d ever want to search for.

In fact, I find that to be the case with almost any search. If I want to find something on Wikipedia, it’s almost always the first entry on Google. So if, instead of YubNub, someone just made a plugin that made a hotkey for doing an I’m Feeling Lucky search in the box that’s already there, it would save tons of clicks relative to YubNub, and even a few to just the Google box that’s already there.

Can someone make that please?

This entry was posted on October 11, 2007 at 1:06 am and is filed under Opinions You Would Agree With If You Weren\'t An Idiot . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed Both comments and pings are currently closed.