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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."
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?
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"
That font seems to be pissing me off.
No sig for you!!
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.
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
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!