Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

goosh, the Unofficial Google Shell

Posted by kdawson on 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."

16 of 310 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Lynx by Slashdot+Suxxors · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Because this is new and exciting.

  2. There will always be a command line by EmbeddedJanitor · · Score: 2, Insightful

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

    --
    Engineering is the art of compromise.
    1. Re:There will always be a command line by ari_j · · Score: 5, Insightful

      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.
  3. What about the images? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

    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.

  4. Re:Totally geeky by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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?

  5. Not particularly useful by Zouden · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

    --
    "A week in the lab saves an hour in the library"
  6. Re:Slow and doesn't work on my mobile browser by aztektum · · Score: 4, Insightful

    That font seems to be pissing me off.

    --
    :: aztek ::
    No sig for you!!
  7. Re:Difference? by sveard · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.

  8. Re:Difference? by Frosty+Piss · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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.
    --
    If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
  9. I guess I'm missing something... by afabbro · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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?

    --
    Advice: on VPS providers
  10. Call me when it supports regular expressions by phreakhead · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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!

  11. Great... by tm2b · · Score: 2, Insightful

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

    --
    "It is our blasphemy which has made us great, and will sustain us, and which the gods secretly admire in us." - Zelazny
  12. Oh come on guys! by mitch_feaster · · Score: 2, Insightful

    I'm sick of everyone talking crap on goosh. Goosh freaking rocks! I'm seriously quite amused by it. And it really is easier to type your search in to goosh and then just type the number of whatever result you want to see. It's quicker and cleaner and everyone saying "It's nothing like a real shell" completely missed the point. Props to Stefan Grothkopp.

    --
    fun
  13. Very interesting by Haoie · · Score: 2, Insightful

    I'll certainly give this a look.

    I suspect the majority of casual Google users really couldn't care less, though.

    --
    If each mistake being made is a new one, then progress is being made.
  14. Re:Totally geeky by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Insightful

    Or you could install Opera and use the search keywords...

  15. Re:Totally geeky by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Insightful

    The best UI choice is saving all your results in one window - just scroll up to go back 10 queries, down to return to the last one, instead of hitting the back/forward buttons over and over or opening a bunch of browser tabs.

    I never realized how ugly and annoying Google's simple text ads were until I saw this. NexTag and eBay adds for (insert any frickin' query term) farewell.