Re: Re: Introducing gnugol - an org-mode-output web search client

From: Dave Taht <d@teklibre.org>
To: emacs-orgmode@gnu.org
Subject: Re: Re: Introducing gnugol - an org-mode-output web search client
Date: Sat, 08 Jan 2011 09:21:38 -0800	[thread overview]
Message-ID: <4D289D22.7090808@teklibre.org> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <87tyhmdksm.fsf@ufl.edu>

On 01/06/2011 09:06 AM, Allen S. Rout wrote:
> Dave Taht <d@teklibre.org> writes:
> 
>> So over the holiday I wrote a command line web search client with an
>> emacs interface and called it "gnugol". It uses the google json and bing
>> json APIs to search the web, and outputs the results in plain text, in
>> whatever format you're working in, notably, org, so you can navigate the
>> results in the mind-set you're in.
> 
> [...]
> 
> On unrelated surfing (reddit), I ran into this:
> 
> http://surfraw.alioth.debian.org/

I credit surfraw with inspiration in my documentation (which is less
funny than theirs!). I've been using that - or something like it - for
years. I should get in touch with them.

My problem was more that

1) I've never got emacs's shells to display even simple applications
like elinks properly

2)  I remember questions as keywords and find the effort of bookmarking
the results too much

3) Going from the Emacs org (or markdown) UI to "webspace" is really
disconcerting for me. My fingers do emacs, my eyeballs like green on
white, and I'd actually like the results spoken aloud whenever I get
the latest emacspeak working...

I love getting the results back in an outline form - tab to expand - I'd
like to add something like org-keys...

4) And gnugol is FAST.

Innumerable other advantages detailed on the web site and doc.

> 
> Do you think it's possible that your two powers combined, would make you
> INVINCIBLE?

No. :/ It would be helpful, however, to come up with marginally better
search of any sort in the general case. This week I prototyped an
interface to stackoverflow (and got a little snarky about the issue in a
blog entry: http://nex-6.taht.net/posts/Screen_Space/ ). Sean Conner and
Brian Clapper been improving the C code considerably.
Not so much work on the elisp. :(

Do do a git pull and build regularly and have a look at the git log for
details.

The positive feedback, help, &  interesting ideas, so far, have been
wonderful.

> I don't know how much they dink with the return stream; it may be "not
> at all", which would be inauspicious for a combination.  But if they're

They don't. They do support 100+ engines however, and can be very useful.

> doing any sort of output capture/filter, then adding an org-mode flavor
> to the list might be really straightforward.

I see centralized search devolving to the point to where we do need end
user filtering - not just anti-spam techniques but also bayesnian
filtering, and reputation servers, and white/blacklists to improve the
quality. There's been a lot of discussion of the recent decline in
google's results on various forums of late.

I've been finding the bing support more useful than I thought.
> 
> 
> 
> - Allen S. Rout
> 
> 
> 
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