If you want to search from the command line and jump to a user-definable browser for results, another solution is use surfraw.
Surfraw provides a fast unix command line interface to a variety of popular WWW search engines and other artifacts of power. It reclaims google, altavista, dejanews, freshmeat, research index, slashdot and many others from the false‐prophet, pox‐infested heathen lands of html‐forms, placing these wonders where they belong, deep in unix heartland, as god loving extensions to the shell.
It's available pre-packaged in some Linux distributions (Debian, Ubuntu, unknown others), from source at debian.org, and the latest development code and releases are available from the official git repository (now living on GitLab).
Installation instructions from tarball or deb file are found on the Wiki.
Trivia note : Surfraw was originally written by Julian Assange. (Acronym/backronym for 'SURFRAW' is Shell Users' Revolutionary Front Rage Against the World Wide Web.)
To do a Google search from the command line:
sr google archibald tuttle
In addition to plain old Google, there are a lot of other built in search types.
To search for an RFC dealing with S/MIME:
sr rfc s/mime
Translate a word:
sr translate logiciel
Find torrents:
sr piratebay free music
(These keyword search types continue to be updated.)
More advanced usage :
$ surfraw google -results=100 RMS, GNU, which is sinner, which is sin? $ sr wikipedia surfraw $ sr austlii -method=phrase dog like $ /usr/lib/surfraw/rhyme -method=perfect Julian
Surfraw is configurable. You can set it up with some defaults, either per-user in $HOME/.surfraw.conf
or system-wide in /etc/surfraw.conf
:
SURFRAW_graphical_browser="/usr/bin/links2 -g" SURFRAW_text_browser="/usr/bin/elinks" SURFRAW_graphical=yes
Here I've set it to use links2 and elinks, but you can use Firefox, Chrome, or any others you prefer.
(Nb. links2 -g
is a strange terminal-embedded graphical-mode browser. It's fast but hates modernity.)