I write in org or markdown format and frequently reference the web while writing.
When I get a web search back via surfraw or a browser, it’s in pure html.
The HTML from modern day search engines, contains redirects, and is both ugly and hard to reformat.
Enter gnugol, the command line, plain text web search client.
Gnugol has multiple output formatters that give me the search results in the mode I’m writing in.
An added benefit is that gnugol is VERY fast, as it’s written in C.
Please see the documentation index for more information about gnugol or visit the website gnugol.taht.net.
The new Gnugol client is quite usable, as is the emacs interface. Try it!
The gnugold code is undergoing a major rewrite to be generalized and support more json backends (notably Xapian), and clean up the plugin idea and so on, so I can go back to exploring the original idea which was using some other transport than tcp to carry this sort of query, over international links.
There are many vestiges of the old code currently in here. You may be eaten by a grue.