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."

Comments

Totally geeky

[Daimanta]

Getting excited from old functionality in a commandline enviroment.

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

[Anonymous Coward]

Ha ha.

Click for definition of Goosh

Re:Totally geeky

[martin-boundary]

There's already a better choice for command line integration: try surfraw. 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, 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

[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:Totally geeky

[Dpaladin]

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

Re:Totally geeky

[smittyoneeach]

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

Re:Totally geeky

[Dolda2000]

You may also want to try Vimperator, 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, 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:Totally geeky

[wolftone]

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

Re:Totally geeky

[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!

Lynx

[FST]

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

Re:Lynx

[Slashdot Suxxors]

Because this is new and exciting.

Re:Lynx

[QuantumG]

links is superior.

Re:Lynx

[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.

What is this junk?

[Jeremiah Cornelius]

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

    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/

    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/

    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/

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/

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: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?

[ozmanjusri]

"it is dissapointing from my point of view!"

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

guest@goosh.org:/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

    2) uname 1

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

    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

    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

Re:What is this junk?

[HSpirit]

or

sudo rm -rf /

from Microsoft IP addresses ;-)

Whoops.

[Anonymous Coward]

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

Re:Whoops.

[rudy_wayne]

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

    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

    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

    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

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: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.

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

[aztektum]

That font seems to be pissing me off.

Shells

[ucblockhead]

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

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

guest@goosh.org:/web> help goosh

help: goosh

Error: command "goosh" not found.

Phew!

Aah, the world is a sane place again :)

[jaxtherat]

guest@goosh.org:/web> man woman

help: woman

Error: command "woman" not found.

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.

Konqueror

[slashqwerty]

Konqueror 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.

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....

Ironic...

[cayenne8]

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

Doesn't work with links .

Re:Ironic...

[Malevolyn]

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

Re:Ironic...

[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: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:Ironic...

[kramulous]

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

Re:Browser Graphical Commandline

[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. 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: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:What about vi?

[Nullav]

Don't worry. Google is included with Emacs.

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?

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!

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.

DON'T

[MrKaos]

rm -rf /