A Swiss Army knife for your address bar
Public alpha
Try it here
Welcome to wxy.us, a website whose sole purpose is a very short domain name!
It's a work in progress intended to make it easy to do a search or lookup directly from the address bar. You can start by going to your address bar and typing "wxy.us/" followed by whatever you'd like to look up; you'll be presented with several options. Try, for example, wxy.us/apple.
If you already know which engine you want to use, wxy.us can help you with that as well. For example, you can use wxy.us/google The Beatles to search for the Fab Four on Google, or wxy.us/dict flagrant to look up the "conspicuously offensive" word on Merriam-Webster Online. View the complete list of magic words here.
Using a magic word at the beginning of your query will show you wxy's guess at what you'd like to search, then redirect you there. If you don't want to go where it guessed, hit reload on your browser or click the "cancel redirection" link before you are transferred to view more options. If you'd simply like to make sure it doesn't guess at all, prefix your query with a space: wxy.us/google maps will help you search for the term "maps" on Google, but wxy.us/ google maps (with a space before the first word) will allow you to select an engine for searching for the term "google maps".
Long story short: Type what you think you want after "wxy.us/" in your address bar. If it doesn't do what you want, try "wxy.us/", then a space, then what you think you want. And if you still don't get what you want, mail requests@go.wxy.us with the words "wxy.us request" in the subject line and I'll see what I can come up with.
Pretty soon, a link-shortening service similar to (but better than!) tinyurl.com or masl.to should be available here. The way I see it working is this: Go to the site you want to mark—say http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/03/31/1746234, for example—and then prefix the URI in the address bar with "http://wxy.us/", making it "http://wxy.us/http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/03/31/1746234". wxy, realizing the query begins with "http://", may suggest a link-shortening option, which, if selected, would result in a URI such as "http://wxy.us/?___" (the blanks to be an arbitrary-length alphanumeric string) redirecting, after a short pause to verify with the user, to the story about UNICORN T-SHIRTS. This is not yet implemented.
A purl.org-style persistent URL service is also in mind, but its implementation would be significantly more complex than the link shortener, requiring a proper user system. This is also not yet implemented.
I've also considered some sort of cookie-based preferences system, by which you, the user, may change or ignore magic words. For example, many of you may not have much use for the "perl" or "php" words, or would rather have "dict" go to dictionary.com or wiktionary. Once I think of a good way to pull it off and have the motivation to roll it, it shall be rolled. Alas, this is also not yet implemented. (Update: A rudimentary ranking system is now implemented; you can use the +/- links beside your results to reorder the services that appear with a specific {or no} magic word. This is implemented in cookies; eventually this should be a feature associated with user accounts to make migration of profiles possible. Once I implement the redirection system, the highest-ranked service for the magic word will be used. 2006Jan11 2002 -0500)
Once again, if you have any ideas for how this site may be made better or more interesting, mail requests@go.wxy.us with the words "wxy.us request" in the subject line.
If you really like what I'm doing, please suggest improvements or help out with the hosting bill.
wxy.us is a project of Peter S. May/Halfgeek Technologies, copyright 2007. This project is operated for the common good. The creators and operators do not claim any affiliation with the search providers linked hereon.
Pay phone original photo courtesy of Jared. Many thanks.