RubNub - For Faster Web Browsing Without URLs

RubNub is a Firefox extension that lets you browse the web without remembering URLs. How?

It uses the YubNub database of user-contributed shortcuts to let you do quick searches on sites like Google, Wikipedia, CNN, Flickr, and Amazon. You can even get the weather or stock quotes using YubNub shortcuts.

Once you install RubNub, you can access these shortcuts directly from your address bar. So instead of going to Google.com and conducting a search for "iPhones", you can type "g iphone" into your address bar and get taken directly to the Google search results page.

The real power of RubNub comes into play when you want to do something more specialized like generating a random number between 1 and 100 ("random 100") or use Google Reader to open an RSS feed ("rssread"). There are literally thousands of these commands that other users have created and that you can also contribute to.

To use these shortcuts, all you need to do is type them into your address bar. They're often shorter than the URLs that you use otherwise, and they help you get to the page you want faster too.

If you'd rather integrate YubNub into your search bar, you can install the search plugin instead, but the bonus of installing RubNub is that it makes your search bar obsolete.

Install RubNub

Labels: Technology