The new YubNub service looks fairly interesting.  It’s a concept that’s been hashed out a million times by individual, isolated programs: use one search interface as a gateway to many others.  Given a keyword and a search term (ie: gim porsche 911,) the gateway will format your search term for use in a Google Images search.

Internet Explorer supports this via its SearchUrl feature.  MSN Desktop Search supports it through its Deskbar Shortcuts (community version here,) and I even wrote a small Javascript application called SearchPad to do the same.  The difference is that YubNub keywords are contributed by anybody, and available to anybody. 

That’s a big difference.

In any case, John Ludwig recently lamented in a software roundup entry on Monad, “Wish you could plug yubnub commands into it.”

Ask, and ye shall receive.  The script’s name is a little awkward, so you’ll probably want to alias it in your custom profile:

## search-yubnub.msh
## Search yubnub from your Monad shell
## For help, use "search-yubnub ge"

## Load the System.Web assembly
[void] [Reflection.Assembly]::LoadWithPartialName("System.Web")

$url = "http://www.yubnub.org/parser/parse?command={0}" -f [System.Web.HttpUtility]::UrlEncode($args)
[Diagnostics.Process]::Start($url)

It would be technically possible to implement a “community scripting” feature that would alias keywords to community-contributed MSH scripts, but I can’t think of why you would want to open your system up to that kind of threat.

[Edit: Monad has now been renamed to Windows PowerShell. This script or discussion may require slight adjustments before it applies directly to newer builds.]