During our final beta testing, this feature has no effect on searches from our main directory.
Shortcuts are keywords which jump directly to a website associated with it.
There is no cost to register a shortcut to take people directly to your site. Each site can have up to 3 free shortcuts associated with it. One could take over someone else's shortcut by offering to pay for it, which will hold it until someone else offers to pay more for it. Some keywords will become quite valuable, while others will likely remain free for good. Register the business name so that your competition would not come up when someone really searches for you.