Here”s an interesting command you can add to your Windows XP and DOS arsenal.
Just take the following text, open Notepad, and create a file google.bat in your main Windows directory (usually c:\windows):
@echo off
if not “%1″==”” (set QUERY=%1) else (goto error)
:loop
shift
if not “%1″==”” (set QUERY=%QUERY%+%1) else (goto exitloop)
goto loop
:exitloop
start http://www.google.com/search?q=%QUERY%
exit
:error
echo You did not enter a search query!
This creates a google command that starts your default web browser and uses the Google search engine to process your search query.
Examples:
google night photography help
google 2006 college basketball statistics
To search MSN”s Live.com instead, replace the “start” command with:
start http://search.live.com/results.aspx?q=%QUERY%
To search Yahoo!:
start http://search.yahoo.com/search?p=%QUERY%
To search Ask:
start http://www.ask.com/web?q=%QUERY%
Though interesting, these batch files are not perfect, as certain special characters may trip up the search.
And now, for something completely different
Why start a web browser session when you can display the results directly in the DOS prompt? Fdisk.com has a Win32/DOS port of the text-based Lynx browser.
If you download and extract the archive to c:\lynx you can replace the line of the above batch file prefixed by “start” with the following lines. This displays the top search results directly in the DOS prompt (the results may be messy, but they should be readable):
call c:\lynx\samples\lynx -nolist -dump “http://www.google.com/search?q=%QUERY%” > tmp.htm
more tmp.htm
del tmp.htm
(Note that the first two lines should actually be one line of code in the batch file.)
You may instead want to download the following batch file we have created. This batch file is an enhancement to the one written in this tip. It starts the Lynx web browser if it exists on your hard drive, and if not, your default web browser starts:
* Google search via the Windows XP / DOS command prompt