Two new toys for writers

Command line searching of Google! -- HSM

Goosh

I want to take a moment to plug two new tools for writers and researchers. The first I found thanks to Slashdot. It’s called Goosh. Goosh replaces the standard Google web page interface with a simulated command-line shell. As much as I like graphical interfaces, I have found that there are certain tasks that are more efficiently done by using the command line. If you use Google as much as I do, I think that you may find that investing the time to learn this shell saves much time when doing actual searches instead of slogging through endless Google web pages. On my (very) old computer, I find that I can do my Google searches in about 1/10 the time that I can using standard Google.

Here’s is how Goosh works. When you start Goosh, it defaults to web searches. To search the web, all you have to do is type the keyword on the command line. It then shows four results. To see more results, just hit enter. To go to one of these results, type the number of the result that you want and then it will open in a new tab. (It may open in a new window on your machine, since I have Firefox set to automatically open any new window requests in a new tab, unless I tell it to do otherwise.)

Blog searching is just as easy. While your prompt says /web, you have one of two choices. You can change the default search to “blog search” by typing the word “blog”, or if you just want to do a single blog search while leaving the default set for web, just type “blog” followed by your keywords, like so:
blog anarchism

There are a lot more commands available, and a brief summary of them is available by typing “help” at the Goosh prompt.

Goosh is not for the casual Googler, since it requires a little bit of a learning curve. I wish that it had a little more documentation and tutorials than the “help” command. But if you are a hard-core Googler, and are comfortable with command-line interfaces, you might find that it’s a big time saver. As a matter of fact, I am thinking about making Goosh my default start-up page. I’ve only been using it for a couple of days, and I wish that I’d found it years ago.

Two new toys for writers