gnugol

[dtaht]

this looks pretty neat. Years ago I worked on a thing called gnugol, which let me keep my context while searching. I'd never got around to getting it to capture the query and result, and index it, so I'd not have to refer to a search engine again, and automatically get urls into the format I was writing again.

I recently dusted it off (the gnugol.el is presently broken) and was thinking about indexing my filesystem and my searches of the web yet again.

https://github.com/dtaht/Gnugol

[Overdr0ne]

Hey, I got around to trying this out, and it installed just fine for me. I didn't seem to need that specific version of libjansson, the default libjansson-dev package on Debian worked just fine for me. Maybe you had similar problems as I did, where any time you have an Emacs package with external dependencies, you risk losing most of your users, because the installation process is no longer a one step, portable process, like it is for an Elpa package. I've been working on some lower hanging fruit, but I'm slowly coming back to working on this utility, where now it's seeming more possible it could gain traction, since guix and nix are stabilizing and gaining in popularity.

I like your backend system. Have you considered adding one for Recoll, or another local search utility? Being able to apply a single query to multiple local and remote backends, and get the result into one or more output formats like you have sounds pretty ideal to me. If I were to change things, it would be to move as much as I could out of C and into elisp without affecting performance too badly, especially now that we have natively compiled elisp.

I got interested in search when I noticed boolean queries of a file system look a lot like a traditional directory tree, but more general. The idea of adding remote backends into that as well is definitely interesting. I'll be coming back to this when the time comes.

[dtaht]

Thx for taking a look. It's the "get the search output in the current buffer in that format" bit that I don't have currently, and I'm pleased to hear my .el worked for you.

What I dream of is something that would search all the closed bugs and email lists left in the world. I don't know how to do that.

yes, this is very doable in straight elisp also. Selfishly, I just have gnugol mapped to "g" in $HOME/bin... I might try tying it into org-mode...

I am thinking I will sit down and make it talk to google or bing's api again. It's free, but you have to go through rigamarole to get a key.