Command line Google searches with goosh

Goosh (short for Google Shell) is a web page that acts like a command-line interface for Google running in your browser window. It's the Google equivalent of the DOS prompt or Unix shell.

At first I just thought it was cute, which it is. But now I've found myself doing most of my searches from it. So let's take it for a spin.

Here's the empty goosh command line.


Now type a search term and hit Enter. The first 4 results display.


Type the number of the result to open that link in a new tab. Type m (for more) to see more results. Type c (for clear) to clear the results. Pressing the up arrow will cycle through previous commands that you typed, just like you can in a shell window. Nice.

There's a cleverness in the way Google's different search capabilities are partitioned in goosh. Type "cd images" and you switch to the images directory.


From the images directory, type your search term, and the image results display.


Or type "video chicago" and you'll search YouTube for Chicago videos.

Now, the kids on Slashdot don't seem to care for it because, well, you can't run unix commands in goosh, which utterly misses the point.


Finally, a geeky in-joke I just can't resist.

Agile development aligns business & IT

An interesting podcast from Scott Hanselman interviewing Owen Rogers. Scott does a consistently fantastic job with his interviews. (A transcript is available if you prefer to read.)

The discussion is about continuous integration and monitoring. But it touches on the concept of continuous integration as "the thin edge of the wedge" of agile adoption in an organization. That is, setting up continuous integration can have a viral quality that begins to inject more agile behavior into the organization.

That's an interesting concept in and of itself. But then the discussion also put forth the notion that agile development aligns IT more closely with the business. This is not an idea I recall hearing explicitly stated before. Thinking about how agile works, this seems patently obvious, of course. But agile is generally presented as an IT-driven effort, primarily for the benefit of IT.

This concept of agile being a mechanism by which to effect business/IT alignment is a good one to keep in your back pocket and could be a useful argument for enterprise architects to help sell agile to the business.

Photo: autumn wedges
by mezone