King  Gary 

There’s been a bit of talk about a new service provided by OpenDNS, a ‘free domain name service’, which allows users to create keywords, such as typing in ‘blog’ in your address bar to go to King Gary, or typing in ‘g king gary’ to search Google for ‘king gary‘. It does this by replacing each search term with a URL that you specify on their website. In order to make this all work, you have to modify your ‘hosts’ file, which is already a task that some people are either unsure of how to perform, or are simply unwilling to do so just because they don’t want to play around with something that isn’t usually intended for them to play with.

This service is pretty cool – but it’s something that Firefox already provides (as does Opera, and several other browsers), right out of the box. Which is why I don’t see what’s so cool about this particular service, especially when it requires at least a little technical insight, whereas something like Firefox is much more widely used and supported, making it easier to find help when needed.

This service is also similar to YubNub, which is also very similar to Firefox’s built-in features, but it at least also adds a few new twists to it, such as being able to use more than one argument, and being able to keep statistics of searches in order to see which ones are the most popular.

I can say with a fair amount of certainty that keyword searches is not a major thing among most browser users, and even if they knew about it, they wouldn’t really be willing to give it a go. This can be attributed partly to the fact that most people use Google for most things, such as showing you the weather, giving you stock quotes, and calculating whatever you throw at it. Why would you ever want to leave mother Google (and Firefox), anyways?

Do you prefer OpenDNS or Firefox for using search keywords? Take your pick below!