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?

Thanks, Dean.

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 "$1"
    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

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

Answer 3

#!/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 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.