[timae]

http://wunbar.com

Quick and simple to make, thought I could make some money on referral fees, but went nowhere.

Failure, I suppose: browsers can do the same thing, with a little setup; and, more importantly, people seem to have a preference to navigate to each of these sites and search them directly.

[Groxx]

I set something like this up myself with a Safari plugin. One thing I learned rather quickly:

nobody searches with capital letters, so hitting the shift key to make a ":" is a pretty big cost. Just use "g <search>", and detect prefixes you know; it's much faster and less awkward to use.

[arvinjoar]

Parang? http://hannesp.se/parang/ The guy who wrote it mentored me when I was a programming noob.

[Groxx]

Same functionality, but I did it with SafariStand. Given how little I used Stand's other features, this probably could've been better :)

[emilsedgh]

Konqueror has this feature since ages. gg:foo for searching foo in google ggi for google images and much more, like imdb, even php for searching in php docs. And thats the most awesome feature ever.

[idoh]

I like this site. I feel that having to type in the prefixes might be a blocker for the normal crowd. Have you tried some different UIs to make picking the service happen?

[edo]

http://spudu.com is the same app with a different UI

[thegyppo]

Have you thought about integrating these similar features into Chrome via a plugin?

Would be fairly good to be able to search Wikipedia by typing w: in the URL bar.

[davidalln]

You can already do this in Chrome. For example, I hit ' to search Wikipedia and hit ; to I'm Feeling Lucky Google.

Preferences -> Basics -> Manage (Next to Default Search)

[Hovertruck]

On top of that, most pages with a functioning search get recognized by Chrome, so for example if I type "e" and hit tab, Chrome lets me search "en.wikipedia.org".

[duck]

I like that idea and use DDG's bang feature all the time.