In the past, a user wanting to search for “foxes” would type “http://google.com” into the address bar, press enter, arrive at Google’s website, type “foxes” into the search field, and finally click “search”.  Today, popular web browsers like Chrome, Firefox, Safari, and Internet Explorer have search built-in to the address bar.  To search for “foxes”, you’d simply type “foxes” into the address bar and get the results from your browser’s designated search engine.  But what if you wanted to search for the weather in Phoenix? Or for a list of movie reviews for a particular movie? Or go directly to a wikipedia article about foxes? It’s easy: YubNub.

Simply put, YubNub is a website with a social command line search.  That said, YubNub really becomes useful when used as the default search engine for your browser.  YubNub has instructions to make it the default search for each major browser.  Once integrated into your browser, you can easily and quickly search any site on the web using the format “command what-to-search-for”.  For example, “g” is the command for google.  So if you want to Google “foxes”, you would type “g foxes” into the address bar.

Other Google search engine commands are known by their initials: “gi foxes” will search Google Images for foxes, “gv foxes” will search Google Videos for foxes.  Want to grab the map for Chicago? “gm chicago”.  Want to grab the latest news about Obama? “gn Obama”.  In fact, most commands are guessable.  ”yt Foxes” will, you guessed it, search YouTube for videos of foxes.  ”wp Fox” will return the wikipedia article about the Fox.  Weather can be grabbed via weather.com or weatherunderground.com with “w 85022″ or “wu 85022″ respectively.  MetaCritic, which lists reviews of video games and movies, is “mc” – “mc Avatar” for the latest Avatar reviews.

This is a very small sampling of YubNub commands.  Regardless of what websites you frequently use, you will find YubNub useful.  This is because literally every major website is already integrated into YubNub.  And if you were able to find one that was not – you can add it! This is where the social aspect comes into play.  Seemingly the most underrated service on the web, I could no recommend using YubNub enough.