Stories
Slash Boxes
Comments

Slashdot

News for nerds, stuff that matters

[ Create a new account ]

Sections

Help

FAQ
Bugs

Stories

About

Services

Jobs

Slashdot Log In

[ Create a new account ]

goosh, the Unofficial Google Shell

Posted by kdawson on Monday June 02, @07:26PM
from the land-a-gooshen dept.

ohxten writes "Stefan Grothkopp has come up with a pretty neat tool called goosh. It's essentially a browser-oriented, shell-like interface that allows you to quickly search Google (and images and news) and Wikipedia and get information in a text-only format. This is quite possibly the coolest thing I've seen in a good while."

[+] goosh, google, slashdotted (tagging beta)

Totally geeky (Score:5, Funny)

by Daimanta (1140543) on Monday June 02, @07:27PM (#23632843)

Getting excited from old functionality in a commandline enviroment.

Reply to This
- What is this junk? (Score:5, Funny)
  
  by Jeremiah Cornelius (137) * on Monday June 02, @07:29PM (#23632877) Homepage Journal
  
  I tried it, and it is dissapointing from my point of view!
  
  guest@goosh.org:/web> ls * 1) Lexus LS - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia The long wheelbase LS 600h L is equipped with Lexus Hybrid Drive, .... [66] In the U.S., the Driver Monitoring System debuted on the LS 600h L sedan. [52] ... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lexus_LS [wikipedia.org] 2) Quality Precision Innovation... since 1880 - The L.S. Starrett Company Manufactures more than 5000 variations of precision tools, gages, measuring instruments, saw blades for industrial, professional and consumer markets ... http://www.starrett.com/ [starrett.com] 3) Livermore Software Technology Corporation 10th International LS-DYNA Users Conference: June 8, 2008 - June 10, 2008. ... Register Now for the 2008 LS-DYNA Conference on our conference website: ... http://www.lstc.com/ [lstc.com] 4) L.S. Frais - Excellence in Slicing and Packing LS Frais. your slicing partner ! Our company Our services Our products ... 2004 - 2008 LS Frais Contact | Legal | Roadmap | Awex | Sitemap | Jobs ... http://www.lsfrais.be/ [lsfrais.be]
  
  Next, I'm gonna try operators and regexes - but I don't have much hope.
  
  Reply to This
  
  Parent
  - Re:What is this junk? (Score:5, Informative)
    
    by peragrin (659227) on Monday June 02, @07:41PM (#23632991)
    
    Now type in one of the numbers. The link opens up in a new tab/window
    
    Or type
    
    open http://slashdot.org/ [slashdot.org]
    
    Reply to This
    
    Parent
    - - Ironic... (Score:5, Funny)
        
        by cayenne8 (626475) on Monday June 02, @08:23PM (#23633349) Homepage Journal
        
        Kind of ironic, that this command line web application, won't work in a commandline browser.
        Doesn't work with links [sourceforge.net] .
        
        Reply to This
        
        Parent
        
        Re:Ironic... (Score:5, Funny)
        
        by Malevolyn (776946) * <{moc.liamg} {ta} {tnignoldengis}> on Monday June 02, @08:54PM (#23633553)
        
        Thanks. You just ruined Portal for all of us who are too broke to afford hardware that can run it. =(
        
        Reply to This
        
        Parent
    - - Re:What is this junk? (Score:5, Funny)
        
        by pablomme (1270790) on Monday June 02, @09:01PM (#23633591)
        
        Unless you have bound Alt + -> to "Horizontal Maximize" in compiz. Of course, if you happen to briefly forget you had, you may stare at the page for a while wondering "Wow - just how the hell do they do that!".
        
        Not saying this happened to me. It was.. erm.. a.. friend of mine.
        
        Reply to This
        
        Parent
  - Re:What is this junk? (Score:5, Funny)
    
    by dominious (1077089) on Monday June 02, @09:51PM (#23633899)
    
    I have a feeling there are going to be a lot of search entries for ls in Google's logs tonight..
    
    Reply to This
    
    Parent
- Re:Totally geeky (Score:5, Interesting)
  
  by vanyel (28049) * on Monday June 02, @07:39PM (#23632979) Journal
  
  It is amazingly fast, you'd think it was a *real* command line environment: fast and efficient.
  
  Reply to This
  
  Parent
- Re:Totally geeky (Score:5, Insightful)
  
  by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 02, @07:48PM (#23633053)
  
  It kind of reveals some good UI design choices though. For example, why should the Google website have a textbox for the search input anyway? If you're at Google, all you'll type in will be for a search. So why not just capture all keyboard inputs into the search input box instead of requiring the user to ever explicitly click/tab and put the input field into focus?
  
  Reply to This
  
  Parent
  - Re:Totally geeky (Score:5, Informative)
    
    by martin-boundary (547041) on Monday June 02, @08:15PM (#23633279)
    
    There's already a better choice for command line integration: try surfraw [debian.org]. This lets you stay within a real command shell such as bash, and just type
    $ google what I want to know
    You'll get the results directly in a browser of your choice. If you're like me, you have the browser set up as w3m [sourceforge.net], so that the google results simply appear in the same terminal where you can click on them. Since w3m is a pager like more and less, you can postprocess the google output, eg
    $ google hello | grep Cached
    www.hello.com/ - 2k - Cached - Similar pages
    www.hellomagazine.com/ - 32k - Cached - Similar pages
    www.hellomagazine.com/royalty/ - 27k - Cached - Similar pages
    en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hello - 39k - Cached - Similar pages
    en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hello_world_program - 32k - Cached - Similar pages
    www.elite.net/~runner/jennifers/hello.htm - 157k - Cached - Similar pages
    www.ipl.org/div/hello/ - 20k - Cached - Similar pages
    www.mylalaland.com/hello/ - 6k - Cached - Similar pages
    publicaddress.typepad.com/ - 58k - Cached - Similar pages
    www.sanrio.com/ - 10k - Cached - Similar pages
    
    Best of all , surfraw is not just limited to google, so you can have a complete shell browsing experience for a lot of different sites.
    
    Reply to This
    
    Parent
    - Re:Totally geeky (Score:5, Informative)
      
      by smitty_one_each (243267) * on Monday June 02, @10:00PM (#23633969) Homepage Journal
      
      Also, w3m runs nicely as an inferior process under emacs.
      http://www.emacswiki.org/cgi-bin/wiki/emacs-w3m#WThreeM [emacswiki.org]
      
      Reply to This
      
      Parent
  - Re:Totally geeky (Score:5, Informative)
    
    by nuzak (959558) on Monday June 02, @08:29PM (#23633389) Journal
    
    Capturing all keyboard inputs would require javascript, and if you have that enabled for google, you'd have noticed it already sets the focus to the input box when loaded.
    
    Reply to This
    
    Parent
- Re:Totally geeky (Score:5, Funny)
  
  by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 02, @08:09PM (#23633225)
  
  Ha ha.
  
  Click for definition of Goosh [urbandictionary.com]
  
  Reply to This
  
  Parent
- Re:Totally geeky (Score:5, Funny)
  
  by Dpaladin (890625) on Monday June 02, @08:36PM (#23633433)
  
  I find that Linux users always Bash new shells, to be honest.
  
  Reply to This
  
  Parent
Whoops. (Score:5, Funny)

by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 02, @07:30PM (#23632891)

guest@goosh.org:/web> web penis
Error: Operation timed out (1212449383081).
I broke it.

Reply to This
- Re:Whoops. (Score:5, Funny)
  
  by rudy_wayne (414635) on Monday June 02, @07:43PM (#23633013)
  
  it's not broken
  
  guest@goosh.org:/web> web penis
  1) Human penis size - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
  Human penis size refers to the length and width of human male genitalia. Interest in larger penis sizes has led to an industry devoted to penis enlargement. ...
  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_penis_size [wikipedia.org]
  
  2) Penis - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
  The penis (plural penises, penes) is an external sexual organ of certain biologically male organisms. The penis is a reproductive organ, technically an ...
  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penis [wikipedia.org]
  
  3) Things You Didn't Know About Your Penis, Interesting Facts That ...
  (WebMD) Here are some things you might have wondered about your penis, but were ... Here's how to avoid penile fracture: don't use your penis too roughly. ...
  http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2008/03/19/health/webmd/main3949777.shtml?source=mostpop_story [cbsnews.com]
  
  4) YouTube - Is it a penis
  ok first of all this is not my video, please to not think it is, i had recently seen it at my friends house and decided to upload it from www.funnyjunk.com!
  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q0sQA9ILZSU [youtube.com]
  
  Reply to This
  
  Parent
I'm kind of glad it didn't work... (Score:5, Funny)

by gardyloo (512791) on Monday June 02, @07:41PM (#23633001)

Just tried it. Wanted to read its documentation. Realized too late that 'man goosh' was a really poor choice of phrase, but just got

guest@goosh.org:/web> help goosh

help: goosh

Error: command "goosh" not found.

Phew!

Reply to This
Not particularly useful (Score:5, Insightful)

by Zouden (232738) on Monday June 02, @07:59PM (#23633143)

One of the biggest advantages of a command-line interface is that you can pipe programs together and create a workflow. You can't do that with this since it's just a command-line imitation in a web browser.
So no neat things like piping the images from an imagesearch.
Secondly, a mouse is still going to be required when you browse to one of the sites returned in the search, so this interface is only useful while you're actually searching.

It's cool, but really only as a novelty.

Reply to This
Future explorer... (Score:5, Funny)

by fahrbot-bot (874524) on Monday June 02, @08:16PM (#23633291)

This is quite possibly the coolest thing I've seen in a good while.
Um, you need to get out more.
Start small. Leave the basement for a day-trip to the garage or back yard....

Reply to This
I guess I'm missing something... (Score:5, Insightful)

by afabbro (33948) on Monday June 02, @09:17PM (#23633681)

I can type in search terms and get the results from Google. And...

Um...

How is this something I couldn't do before? I can certainly do this on my own (real) command line - surfraw has been mentioned, and a perl script and the Google API (or even without it) means "getting a list of links for a search term from google" is not exactly unknown.

It has a cute CLI-like interface, but not really. "This google-interface behaves similar to a unix-shell." Um, no, not really. It's a cute interface, but not a real shell by any stretch...

So what am I missing?

Reply to This
Call me when it supports regular expressions (Score:5, Insightful)

by phreakhead (881388) on Monday June 02, @09:45PM (#23633857) Homepage

This is really sad. It's not UNIX until I can type

%> search "lindsay lohan\'s (boobs|tits|chest|underwear|bank account.*[0-9]+)"

Now if it was a real shell binary that you could run IN UNIX then I might be slightly impressed. I could make this "shell" in 10 lines of CSS!

Reply to This
- Re:Lynx (Score:5, Informative)
  
  by QuantumG (50515) * <qg@biodome.org> on Monday June 02, @07:34PM (#23632931) Homepage Journal
  
  links [sourceforge.net] is superior.
  
  Reply to This
  
  Parent
- Re:Slow and doesn't work on my mobile browser (Score:5, Informative)
  
  by merreborn (853723) on Monday June 02, @08:00PM (#23633145)
  
  it's in BETA and it's a Google side project
  In the block of text at the top of the page, it says "NOT an official google product!". Additionally, the whois info for the domain shows it's personally registered by Mr. Grothkopp himself, in Germany.
  
  As such, if by "google side project", you mean "an experimental project created by a google employee", I believe you may be wrong. It's some random hacker's side project, and it queries a google API, but that's the only resemblance to a "google side project" it bears.
  
  Reply to This
  
  Parent
- - Re:Slow and doesn't work on my mobile browser (Score:5, Insightful)
    
    by aztektum (170569) on Monday June 02, @08:00PM (#23633147)
    
    That font seems to be pissing me off.
    
    Reply to This
    
    Parent
- - Re:What about vi? (Score:5, Funny)
    
    by Nullav (1053766) <Nullav@gmail.com> on Monday June 02, @08:56PM (#23633563)
    
    Don't worry. Google is included with Emacs.
    
    Reply to This
    
    Parent

Get More Comments

Reply

Slashdot

News for nerds, stuff that matters

Sections

Technology

Help

Stories

About

Services

Jobs

Slashdot Log In

goosh, the Unofficial Google Shell

Related Stories

goosh, the Unofficial Google Shell 25 Comments More | Login | Reply /

Please Log In to Continue

Totally geeky (Score:5, Funny)

What is this junk? (Score:5, Funny)

Re:What is this junk? (Score:5, Informative)

Ironic... (Score:5, Funny)

Re:Ironic... (Score:5, Funny)

Re:What is this junk? (Score:5, Funny)

Re:What is this junk? (Score:5, Funny)

Re:Totally geeky (Score:5, Interesting)

Re:Totally geeky (Score:5, Insightful)

Re:Totally geeky (Score:5, Informative)

Re:Totally geeky (Score:5, Informative)

Re:Totally geeky (Score:5, Informative)

Re:Totally geeky (Score:5, Funny)

Re:Totally geeky (Score:5, Funny)

Whoops. (Score:5, Funny)

Re:Whoops. (Score:5, Funny)

I'm kind of glad it didn't work... (Score:5, Funny)

Not particularly useful (Score:5, Insightful)

Future explorer... (Score:5, Funny)

I guess I'm missing something... (Score:5, Insightful)

Call me when it supports regular expressions (Score:5, Insightful)

Re:Lynx (Score:5, Informative)

Re:Slow and doesn't work on my mobile browser (Score:5, Informative)

Re:Slow and doesn't work on my mobile browser (Score:5, Insightful)

Re:What about vi? (Score:5, Funny)