Google Search from Linux Terminal

Question

I saw a Google console app someone wrote a while back, but it was actually a website emulating a console.

What I'm after is a shortcut or linux terminal app which I canuse to quickly search google.

Ideally, it will show the top 10 search results with numbers next to them, and pressing the number will open the site in a browser.

Having the Google results open in a browser is fine too however.

Does anyone have a solution?

Answer 1

Here's a simple bash function that lets you type

google foo bar

and which will then open your default browser to display the Google results page for those search terms:

google() {
    search=""
    echo "Googling: $@"
    for term in $@; do
        search="$search%20$term"
    done
    xdg-open "http://www.google.com/search?q=$search"
}

Simply paste that in your terminal to give it a try.

Answer 2

#!/bin/bash

if [[ $(echo $*) ]]; then

    searchterm="$*"

else

    read -p "Enter your search term: " searchterm

fi

searchterm=$(echo $searchterm | sed -e 's/\ /+/g')

lynx -dump http://www.google.com/search?q=$searchterm | less

Copy and paste this script into ~/bin, name it "goose" or something (GOOgle SEarch). Chmod it +x

Usage is:

goose searchterm

Clearly, you have to have Lynx installed.

Answer 3

Beagle can search from terminal. Or you've to look for browsers like Elinks.

Answer 4

If you're willing to sign up for a Google API key, you should be able to use the Net::Google Perl module in tandem with the Google SOAP API to do this. See here and here for simple perl scripts that use Net::Google.

You can also use the less specialised SOAP::Lite perl module for this task.

Alternatively, you can screen scrape Google queries via WWW::Mechanize, Web::Scraper or one of the many Perl screen-scraping modules, if you aren't disturbed by it's nebulous legal standing. Here's a good tutorial to get you started.

A command-line tool like this might work well when combined with a browser like Uzbl to provide a fast browsing experience.

Answer 5

You can use a terminal browser like Elinks, which allows you to browse the web in the terminal and optionally open a link in another browser, like Firefox.

Answer 6

Lynx - a general purpose distributed information browser for the World Wide Web. Lynx is a fully-featured World Wide Web (WWW) client for users running cursor-addressable, character-cell display devices (e.g., vt100 terminals, vt100 emulators running on Windows 95/NT or Macintoshes, or any other "curses-oriented" display).

It will display hypertext markup language (HTML) documents containing links to files residing on the local system, as well as files residing on remote systems running Gopher, HTTP, FTP, WAIS, and NNTP servers. Current versions of Lynx run on Unix, VMS, Windows 95/NT, 386DOS and OS/2 EMX.

Answer 7

I wrote a small application to allow you to do a Google search via CLI, it is actually very simple and currently only supports Web search, Images search and News search.

Codename: Gisele

$ php gisele.phar web -m 5 "stackoverflow"
1) Stack Overflow - http://stackoverflow.com/
2) Ask Question - http://stackoverflow.com/users/login
3) Stack overflow - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stack_overflow
4) Blog Stack Exchange - http://blog.stackexchange.com/
5) StackOverflow - IT Conversations - The Conversations Network - http://itc.conversationsnetwork.org/series/stackoverflow.html