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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."

19 of 310 comments (clear)

  1. Totally geeky by Daimanta · · Score: 5, Funny

    Getting excited from old functionality in a commandline enviroment.

    --
    Knowledge is power. Knowledge shared is power lost.
    1. 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?

    2. Re:Totally geeky by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

      Ha ha.

      Click for definition of Goosh

    3. Re:Totally geeky by martin-boundary · · Score: 5, Informative
      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.

    4. Re:Totally geeky by Dpaladin · · Score: 5, Funny

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

      --
      Bad puns gave me bad karma. =(
    5. Re:Totally geeky by wolftone · · Score: 5, Funny

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

  2. What is this junk? by Jeremiah+Cornelius · · Score: 5, Funny

    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.

    --
    "Flyin' in just a sweet place,
    Never been known to fail..."
    1. Re:What is this junk? by pablomme · · Score: 5, Funny

      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.

      --
      The state you are in while your HEAD is detached... - wait, what?
    2. Re:What is this junk? by dominious · · Score: 5, Funny

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

    3. Re:What is this junk? by HSpirit · · Score: 5, Funny
      or

      sudo rm -rf /
      from Microsoft IP addresses ;-)
  3. Whoops. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

    guest@goosh.org:/web> web penis
    Error: Operation timed out (1212449383081). I broke it.
  4. I'm kind of glad it didn't work... by gardyloo · · Score: 5, Funny

    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!

  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. Future explorer... by fahrbot-bot · · Score: 5, Funny
    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 must have been something you assimilated. . . .
  7. Ironic... by cayenne8 · · Score: 5, Funny
    Kind of ironic, that this command line web application, won't work in a commandline browser.

    Doesn't work with links .

    --
    Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
    1. Re:Ironic... by oracle128 · · Score: 5, Informative

      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.

  8. Re:What about vi? by Nullav · · Score: 5, Funny

    Don't worry. Google is included with Emacs.

    --
    I just read Slashdot for the articles.
  9. 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!

  10. 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.