goosh, the Unofficial Google Shell

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."

Totally geeky

[Daimanta]

Getting excited from old functionality in a commandline enviroment.

What is this junk?

[Jeremiah Cornelius]

I tried it, and it is dissapointing from my point of view!

[e-mail]:/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.

Re:What is this junk?

[peragrin]

Now type in one of the numbers. The link opens up in a new tab/window

Or type

  open http://slashdot.org/ [slashdot.org]

Re:

[peragrin]

or try

images natalie portman grits

and pic a number to go to the url.

Re:

[ottothecow]

Yeah, but safe search appears to be on.

Anybody know how to turn it off? man safesearch?

Ironic...

[cayenne8]

Kind of ironic, that this command line web application, won't work in a commandline browser.

Doesn't work with links [sourceforge.net] .

Re:

[enoz]

The Shell is a Lie

Re:Ironic...

[Malevolyn]

Thanks. You just ruined Portal for all of us who are too broke to afford hardware that can run it. =(

Re:

[Anonymous Coward]

No, the cake is clearly a lie. Whether or not there is cake in existence within the laboratory is irrelevant. You are told you are going to get cake when you are really going to be thrown into the fire. Even the people who escaped the fire and left you notes telling you of the lie most likely never saw the cake.

Re:

[enoz]

When I finished it I never got to have cake.

The promise was that you would receive cake after completing the tasks, and it seemed to be that you were never meant to survive. Even if you consider the ending as survival you don't actually get The Cake.

Perhaps this Coward has only seen the ending video instead of playing the game.

Re:Ironic...

[oracle128]

Technically, the *player* is promised cake and grief counselling at the conclusion of the test, not necessarily the character (Chell). It is not specified that they will actually be given the cake, only that it will be available (which it was, the character presumably being dead was just an unfortunate circumstance preventing the character from eating said cake). Nor does it specify that "cake" isn't a metaphor for something else, such as "dumped into an incinerator" or that it may be available in the afterlife. We were shown the cake, we know it exists. If Chell didn't want to go back and get some, it's her own fault. Perhaps this user has only used cheats to get to the last level, instead of playing through the whole game.

Re:

[geminidomino]

You just contradicted yourself. First you say that the player is promised cake. Well, upon completing the game, I received no cake. The cake is a lie.

But the cake WAS available, but Chelle couldn't eat it? Because they threw her into a fire? So that cake is a lie too.

And the metaphor argument doesn't hold, because the cake exists, YOU JUST CAN'T HAVE ANY! Neener neener neener

Re:

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Re:

[kramulous]

I can verify that it doesn't work with lynx either.

Re:

[cyphercell]

...to keep your hands off the mouse, alt+ "->" works to move forward a page and back a page in firefox.

Re:What is this junk?

[pablomme]

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.

Re:

[llamalad]

I tried:

cd ..

Disappointing indeed.

Re:What is this junk?

[dominious]

I have a feeling there are going to be a lot of search entries for ls in Google's logs tonight..

Re:What is this junk?

[HSpirit]

or

sudo rm -rf /

from Microsoft IP addresses ;-)

Re:What is this junk?

[ozmanjusri]

"it is dissapointing from my point of view!"

I'm not surprised. Check out the kernel it's running on.

[e-mail]:/web> uname -r
    1) uname
The uname() function shall return a string naming the current system in the character array sysname. Similarly, nodename shall contain the name of this node ...
http://www.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/009695399/functions/uname.html [opengroup.org]

    2) uname 1

http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/man.cgi?query=uname&sektion=1 [freebsd.org]

    3) uname function.
uname is NOT in the ANSII library but is handy for getting system information. It will return handy things like:. System type (name). Host name (Nodename). ...
http://www.space.unibe.ch/comp_doc/c_manual/C/FUNCTIONS/uname.html [unibe.ch]

    4) Unix man pages: uname (2)
UNAME(2) Linux Programmer's Manual UNAME(2) NAME uname - get name and information about current kernel SYNOPSIS #include int uname(struct ...
http://www.rt.com/man/uname.2.html [rt.com]
 

There will always be a command line

[EmbeddedJanitor]

Pointing and clicking is easy for some stuff, but the command line is still king for many purposes.

Re:There will always be a command line

[ari_j]

Pointing and clicking is easy for some stuff, but the command line is still king for many purposes.

And this isn't one of them.

What about the images?

[Anonymous Coward]

How does it search Google images when it's text only? Is there an ASCII art module built in, or something?

Actually, hmm, that'd be pretty damn cool, ... ASCII goatse isn't nearly as shocking as the real thing, which is a bonus.

Re:Totally geeky

[vanyel]

It is amazingly fast, you'd think it was a *real* command line environment: fast and efficient.

Re:Totally geeky

[Anonymous Coward]

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?

Re:Totally geeky

[martin-boundary]

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.

Re:Totally geeky

[smittyoneeach]

Also, w3m runs nicely as an inferior process under emacs.
http://www.emacswiki.org/cgi-bin/wiki/emacs-w3m#WThreeM [emacswiki.org]

Re:Totally geeky

[wolftone]

...there's a process that is inferior to emacs?

Re:Totally geeky

[Dolda2000]

You may also want to try Vimperator [mozdev.org], a Firefox extension for controlling the browser entirely with the keyboard, with vi-like keybindings. It's not perfect, but I find it much more convenient than the standard mouse-driver interface.

Re:Totally geeky

[dotancohen]

You may also want to try Vimperator [mozdev.org], a Firefox extension for controlling the browser entirely with the keyboard, with vi-like keybindings. It's not perfect, but I find it much more convenient than the standard mouse-driver interface.

Vimperator really is a great product, I even donated to the developer recently. I am browsing with it now, and I am not a VI-junkie either. In fact, I now intend to learn VI because Vimperator has made browsing that much easier.

My favorite features:
* Best hit-a-hint implementation. There are other extensions that do this, but vimperator is the easiest to use on a laptop with no numpad.
* j/k scrolling. This is so convenient that I don't understand why it is not the default
* Cleaner interface. No menu, location bar, nothing but the status bar until you start a command.
* Next/Previous buttons. Vimperator finds the "next" and "previous" links in webpages and follows them when you click ]] and [[.
* I could go on and on.

Re:

[navsan]

...and just type $ google what I want to know You'll get the results directly in a browser of your choice.

Wow! And it's even psychic!

Re:Totally geeky

[nuzak]

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.

Re:

[khellendros1984]

Because that's what the user expects to have to do. The net's already confusing enough, with all the flash and different site design ideas. Why make it worse by making the textboxes react in novel ways? Then again, I guess it's Google. They could probably get away with it.

Re:Totally geeky

[Anonymous Coward]

Ha ha.

Click for definition of Goosh [urbandictionary.com]

Re:Totally geeky

[Dpaladin]

I find that Linux users always Bash new shells, to be honest.

Lynx

[FST]

In all seriousness, why not just use Lynx if you want text only?

Re:

[Slashdot Suxxors]

Because this is new and exciting.

Re:Lynx

[QuantumG]

links [sourceforge.net] is superior.

Re:

[mario_grgic]

Lynx is more like VI, links is more like using GUI (it has popup dialogs, menus etc).

Some people prefer vi style of navigation through pages, myself included.

Re:

[cheater512]

Its technically superior as well as having a better UI. :P

I have actually used it with popups. It handles javascript to a certain extent.

Re:

[AnyoneEB]

I agree with the sibling poster: links is good if you want a browser that acts like a GUI browser and is good with a mouse. I prefer lynx to links because if I am using a text-based browser, I usually want to control it with the keyboard, and I find lynx works better for that.

Re:

[c_g_hills]

links also has a graphical mode. It doesn't support much in the way of modern web features like advanced css and javascript, but it gives a rather nice old-fashioned browsing experience, and some sites such as freshmeat look just as good as in a modern browser.

Re:

[antdude]

I prefer Elinks [elinks.or.cz].

Re:

[DeathElk]

Hand in your card and fuck off, coward

Re:

[lena_10326]

The shell is text. Navigating to the link is not. Not the same as Lynx.

Re:

[peragrin]

yes they are
type in the number of the result you want.

to see more results type in more

try typing in help if your confused.

it's actually really clever. you don't have to remove your hands from the keyboard.

Re:

[grizdog]

Maybe the plan is to make this the built-in shell on a thin web interface. We've had lots of discussions about this on /. - There are a lot of people who don't want much more than a browser, email client, and a word processor/spreadsheet. This might be the first pass at a shell for this market - they'll probably just use the standard browser, but if there has to be a shell in there somewhere, this might make more sense than bash.

Re:

[Jugalator]

Because you may only want Google to be text only, since searches are only made of text anyway. That doesn't imply you want all sites to be text only.

This gets rid of the ads too.

It also gets rid of Google's link tracking that also sometimes slows things down, because you are redirected through their servers. (do know that Google manipulates the browser status bar to "lie" and hide the link tracking, and that you're actually always passed through Google servers)

Re:

[Reapman]

have you even tried goosh? it's a command line but allows graphics.. try an image search. plus if you want to click a link your not worried if that page supports text browsing (all pages should but that's another topic)

Re:

[solafide]

Actually, google's interface is fairly cluttered in lynx; the text box is preceded by about 15 links.

Re:

[BronsCon]

try typing addengine... replace your firefox google search with goosh :)

source code says

[LordMyren]

source code says "readable" source code will be posted soon.

i await that.

theres a lot of cool text interfaces happening on the web. theres in browser vi (jsvi), and source code editors like CodeMirror, CodePress, and more[1]. all very cool!

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_Javascript-based_source_code_editors [wikipedia.org]

Whoops.

[Anonymous Coward]

[e-mail]:/web> web penis
Error: Operation timed out (1212449383081).

I broke it.

Re:Whoops.

[rudy_wayne]

it's not broken

[e-mail]:/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]

Re:

[Anonymous Coward]

Now I know what a goosh is:

[e-mail]:/web> web goosh
    1) Urban Dictionary: goosh
Man the girl has such a small goosh i could barley fit two fingers in! ...
http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?defid=738117&term=goosh

Grea idea

[compro01]

Create an interactive site, then post it to slashdot. Anyone opening book on how long the server will last?

Slow and doesn't work on my mobile browser

[garcia]

So I loaded it and watched it work -- reminiscent of ANSI BBSs but with AJAX instead.  It was quick on my laptop but on my mobile device it took longer to load that Google did itself and while I could enter search terms I couldn't submit them.  But it's in BETA and it's a Google side project so we should all bow before its greatness.

So here: <bow></bow> :)

Re:

[owlstead]

That bowing seems to be an empty statement.

Re:Slow and doesn't work on my mobile browser

[aztektum]

That font seems to be pissing me off.

Re:

[owlstead]

As for the choice of the specific non-proportional font please blame the SlashDot site. As for using a non-proportional font while discussing a CLI, well, this IS slashdot. Hand in your geek license *now*!

Re:

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Re:Slow and doesn't work on my mobile browser

[merreborn]

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.

Shells

[ucblockhead]

I'd be more impressed if it were an actual shell.

real bash web shell?

[v1]

That'd be nice to have a usable bash shell via web interface, for those times when we have access to a kiosk etc that has a web browser but no terminal/ssh. With the right web page we could ssh into our machine at home.

Re:

[Bill, Shooter of Bul]

You really want to proxy your ssh through some random guy's site? That seams like a not-so-secure shell to me.

I'm kind of glad it didn't work...

[gardyloo]

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

[e-mail]:/web> help goosh

help: goosh

Error: command "goosh" not found.

Phew!

Re:

[Joebert]

Realized too late that 'man goosh' was a really poor choice of phrase

I'd seen the "/web>" at the end of the command line and tried "cd /" which fetched me some music results, but I've got tears in my eyes after reading yours, that's freaking hilarious !

Check out JavaScript Shell...

[Anik315]

You can actually take something like JavaScript Shell [squarefree.com] and add JSON based query features to it. This would allow things like command line based search, news... etc and has the advantage of using JavaScript as command syntax. You can write JavaScript functions to access and manipulate JSON variables. (easier said than done, from someone whose done it )

Aah, the world is a sane place again :)

[jaxtherat]

[e-mail]:/web> man woman

help: woman

Error: command "woman" not found.

Pure Beauty

[alexborges]

Ive tested it and i can say it now: pure beauty.

I need this as a bash-completion plugin. I need it NOW, NOW, NOW.

New Home Page

[W. Justice Black]

Totally my new home page now. Since half my web searches start with me using a Google keyword search in Firefox anyway, this is just that much better. Wow. Now it just needs "open in new tab," which I'm sure will come about in short order...

Not particularly useful

[Zouden]

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.

Re:Not particularly useful

[martin-boundary]

I posted this in another comment already, but here's a version with more details: if you use surfraw and w3m together, you can essentially have clickable google results inside an xterm, and a first class piping mechanism. You might have to change the color scheme in w3m if it clashes with your *term settings, or just try this out in a plain vanilla black and white terminal.

apt-get install surfraw w3m

export PATH=$PATH:/usr/lib/surfraw

export SURFRAW_graphical=no

export SURFRAW_browser=/usr/bin/w3m

export SURFRAW_text_browser=/usr/bin/w3m

export SURFRAW_graphical_browser=/usr/bin/iceweasel

export SURFRAW_graphical_remote=yes

google hello # (clickable results "in" the terminal)

google slashdot | grep Cached | head

slashdot.org/ - 76k - Cached - Similar pages
slashdot.org/bookmark.pl?url - 13k - Cached - Similar pages
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slashdot - 83k - Cached - Similar pages
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slashdot_effect - 34k - Cached - Similar pages
Cached - Similar pages
yro.slashdot.org/ - 44k - Cached - Similar pages
yro.slashdot.org/yro/07/05/02/0235228.shtml - 451k - Cached - Similar pages
hardware.slashdot.org/ - 40k - Cached - Similar pages
Cached - Similar pages
politics.slashdot.org/ - 45k - Cached - Similar pages

It's also possible to write some scripts so that w3m can open new terminals when clicking a link, and if you cannot live without images inside a terminal, there's the w3m-img package you can install.

I also like to use w3mman as the system man pager, which lets me click on urls and file paths referenced inside a man page.

needs command line option in Query String

[Chapter80]

Enhancement request:
For Full command line emulation, you should be able to put the command into a query string: "http://www.goosh.com/?s slashdot"

Seriously cool stuff

Konqueror

[slashqwerty]

Konqueror [konqueror.org] has this functionality built into the location bar. To search Google, just type "gg: search phrase". To search wikipedia, type "wp: search phrase". Forgot what Moore's law is? "fd:Moore's law". Someone created a new search engine? You can add your own shortcuts.

You can even set a default search engine. In that case anything that doesn't look like a valid URL goes to the default search engine. To top that off, you can select text, then middle-click on the background and it will be just like tossing the text into the location bar and pressing return. You can select a phrase from a web page and middle click to instantly run a web search on the phrase. It's one of Konqueror's coolest features.

Browser Graphical Commandline

[Doc Ruby]

I'd been excited in the 1990s about a browser growing to include all commandline functionality. Netscape started a project called "XMLterm" which used the browser to send commandlines to the local or a remote host, then display the output in the browser. Which showed some results as clickable icons in that resulting page. But the project never produced a usable release, and seemed to die sometime before Netscape itself turned into Mozilla and then Firefox.

But XMLterm [xmlterm.org] lives! Someone's completing the project. I'm really psyched to see this system work. And even more psyched for the possibility that it could support different "Web APIs" at different hosts it connect to, different DOMs and other object models, perhaps with mappings to some grand unified object model (and browser for it). It seems like a great way to implement a client for goosh, this Google shell.

That would be really cool, and finally start to transcend some of the "CLI vs GUI" ghettoes we've stuck ourselves in. Or at least give the GUI people most of the CLI stuff, except its pure simplicity. Which, as a GUI person who uses CLIs all day long, sounds great to me.

Re:

[Ai Olor-Wile]

That XMLterm.org page looks kind of evil. I think it may actually be a spam-blog that rips stuff from here [xml.com]. It's just a little bit hard to credit some of the stuff they link to as official Mozilla sites given their propensity to misspelling Firefox, and the fact that the download buttons are blank. Also, I strongly doubt that the people who wrote XMLterm were peddling some of the crap that blog links to. Alas, it may be more dead than you think.

Re:

[Doc Ruby]

Good catch. I Googled some of the strings I randomly copied from that XMLterm.org blog (all entries posted on 2007/10/20), and found them all elsewhere at XML.com . Important links like "about" and "archives" link to nothing.

What an asshole stunt, I suppose to harvest a few emails from registrants. Targeting geeks, none of whom registered to post anyway. And helping ruin the reputation of a fascinating dormant project.

If the jerk behind that site had spent that much time just improving the real XMLterm beta

surfraw

[poopie]

*years* ago, most of us were doing this same type of thing from a commandline with lynx/links.

If you like this, you'll probably like surfraw too

http://surfraw.alioth.debian.org/ [debian.org]

All the goodness of goosh without the need for X or a browser

I actually added some of the handlers years ago, but I found that eventually Google searchbox was able to do many of them for me directly - like "quote intc" , "ufo site=cnn.com", etc.

I created my own handlers (elvii) for internal intranet use to do all sorts of mundane que

How about Google Code Search?

[katterjohn]

Come on, they make something as geeky as this and neglect Google Code Search [google.com]? For shame!

Suprised

[Missing_dc]

I'm suprised you are not all "gooshing" in excitement. Its like Google portable.

Future explorer...

[fahrbot-bot]

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....

It's running FreeBSD

[wikes82]

$ uname -a 1) uname 1 http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/man.cgi?query=uname&sektion=1 [freebsd.org]

Needs Teletype Sounds

[meehawl]

I had the pleasure once of logging into and working on an ancient PDP-11/73 running 4.2BSD hooked up to an actual line printer/teletype machine. The noise was deafening, and kind of sexy. This web page needs a sound effect option for maximum retro verisimilitude.

I guess I'm missing something...

[afabbro]

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?

vi keys in Google

[Ilyakub]

On a somewhat related note, Google is experimenting with vi keyboard shortcuts for their search interface. You can test it at labs.google.com/experimental.

Call me when it supports regular expressions

[phreakhead]

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!

Cool tidbit

[nog_lorp]

From goosh.org/goosh.js:
------
  If you want to extend goosh.org, please take a look at the load command.
You can see an example module at http://goosh.org/ext/spon.js

Code of an extension: (indented properly)
------
function search_spon() {
    this.name = "spon";
    this.aliases = new Array("spon","spiegel");
    this.mode = true; this.help = "search in spiegel.de";
    this.call = function(args) {
        this.start = 0; this.args = "site:www.spiegel.de "+args.join(" ");
        this.query("web",this.args);
    }

    this.next = function() {
        this.start += 4;
        if(this.args)
            this.query("web",this.args);
    }

    this.render = function(context, results, status, details, unused) {
        if(results && results.results != "")
            this.hasmore = true;
        else
            this.hasmore = false;
        this.renderResult(context, results, status, details, unused);
    }
}
register_searcher("spon","web");

Great...

[tm2b]

So in other words, we've come full circle and invented gopher [wikipedia.org], archie [wikipedia.org], and WAIS [wikipedia.org].

DON'T

[MrKaos]

rm -rf /

SQL interface

[hweimer]

Nice idea, but I like the SQL interface [cpan.org] better.

Re:

[compro01]

What about EMACS? ;)

Re:What about vi?

[Nullav]

Don't worry. Google is included with Emacs.

Re:

[pilgrim23]

and ANSI art scripts?

Re:

[Anonymous Coward]

Duh. You forgot Sudo.

Re:Difference?

[sveard]

There are other comments on this story that show the same sentiment: "why use this when we've got a terminal (with a few scripts)"

Are these posted by the same people who say that Open Source's strength lies in its diversity?

We should applaud the effort that has gone into this project, even though it may not be equally useful to everyone.

Re:Difference?

[Frosty Piss]

What's the difference between this and bash with a few handwritten scripts to grab results?

The difference is that this guy has already written the "few handwritten scripts" (as opposed to machine written scripts?), so I don't have to.

Re:

[morgan_greywolf]

Get a mobile phone that runs Linux [openmoko.com].

Re:

[Gavagai80]

Not only is it not against their TOS, they provide API tools and instructions to help you perform automated queries. What you don't have the right to do is drive huge amounts of traffic through them, such as by setting up your own google-clone website that you advertise to the world.

Re:

[atomic-penguin]

That's a good start. However that will not make use of the boolean operators or do multiple word searches that way.

#!/usr/bin/perl

my $goog_query=qq/@ARGV/;

$goog_query =~ s/\+/%2b/g; # Change AND operators (+ signs) to hex code
$goog_query =~ s/\s+/\+/g; # Change spaces to + signs

my $goog_output=qx!curl -s -A Mozilla/5.0 "http://www.google.com/search?q=$goog_query" | html2text -ascii!;

# TODO
# put a regex here to clean up extra crufty output
# (i.e. headers, footers, advertisements).

print $goog_output;