DavidBreyer.Com

YubNub.org is more than just a strange name. It’s the first social search engine. While the default search is Google, certains commands will let you search other sites as well. You see YubNub is also the first command-line search engine. For instance typing “wp” before your search criteria will let you search Wikipedia.org. (i.e. “wp Cincinnati”)

There are an entire slew of commands. “gim” for instance will search Google images. And simply typing “ls” will give you a list of commands.

Popular commands:

gnews - Searches Google News
cnn - Searches CNN
am - Searches Amazon
weather - Gets weather for zip code
flk - Searches Flickr

Now where this site gets really cool is you can create your own commands. I did say it was social right? Just type in “create YOURCOMMANDNAME” and if it isn’t taken you will be able to create your own command with that name.

For instance I created two new searches. “cincy” will search Cincinnati.com. So if you type in “cincy reds win” it will bring up all articles from the Cincinnati Enquirer, WCPO, CiN Weekly, and The Post. The second new command is “dwb”. It will search this blog. So if you type “dwb yubnub” you will find this post.

Commands I Created:

cincy - Searches Cincinnati.com
dwb - Searches this blog
redbooks - Searches IBM redbooks

Do you YubNub?

http://www.technorati.com

When I ask people about this site, they are always confused to what it is. So I am going to give you my explaination of Technorati.

Technorati is simply a search engine for blogs. It’s kind of like Google, but the content is updated more often. In fact, after I publish this blog post, a ping will be sent to Technorati.com tell them my page is updated. Technorati will then index my new post. Without getting into the underlying details, this ping is done by specifying “http://rpc.technorati.com/rpc/ping” under Update Services in my Wordpress options.

In order to have Technorati index your site, you will have to first claim your blog. Sign up for an account. In Member Tools, click claimed weblogs, enter the URL (web address) of your site. It will then give you HTML to put on your site. Once Technorati sees you updated your site with the specified HTML, it will know that is indeed your blog. When I did this, it took a day or two to actually say I claimed my blog. So you have to be patient.

Once your blog is claimed, you can then (sorry I only know Wordpress, check your blogs instructions) specify “http://rpc.technorati.com/rpc/ping” in your Update Services. Everytime you publish a post, this will tell Technorati that your site needs to be indexed. You can also do a manual ping here. This updating on your schedule is why it’s called the real-time web.

There are two ways to search Technorati. You can either specify a tag or keywords (i.e. works like a standard search engine). Typing in words like “Cincinnati” or “Bruce Campbell” will search the entire text of an article. Just like Google. But where the real genius of Technorati is, is in tags. Typing in “tag:Cincinnati” or “tag:Bruce Campbell” will give you only articles (and pictures from flickr.com and links from furl and del.icio.us) regarding that tag. A tag in Wordpress is simply a category, which you can specify multiple categories per post. You can also specify a tag with HTML only.

So if you want to increase your blog exposure or if you want to monitor what’s going on in blogosphere. Technorati is your solution.

Google’s new video search allows users to search recent TV shows. It shows screen captures and text from the show. Searching for Jack Bauer revealed last night’s episode of 24.