Emacs Web Searching

search.org

Introduction

Sometimes I want to make a quick web search, and I’d prefer not to leave Emacs. Sure, I could switch over to a different workspace and open a browser, but I’d much rather do it in Emacs if possible. eww will let you search instead of enter a URL, but you only get one search engine (which is, by default, Duck Duck Go). I’m used to the wonderful interface of Chrome, which allows you to use a keyword to specify your search engine, right within the “Omnibox”. Anything else feels crude. So, I decided I would implement my own search solution!

Interface

The code below creates two commands:

• search-web allows you to search by specifying an engine like this: “ddg:search term here”, or by omitting the engine and just entering a term, so that you use your default search engine.
• search-engine allows you to search by prompting you for a search engine and a search term seperately. This is actually a helper function to search-web, but maybe you’d prefer to be prompted! Who am I to judge?

Both functions will give you an error message if you provide a bad search engine.

Installation

You can “install” this into your Emacs by simply adding the code blocks below to your .emacs. Or, if you happen to use an Org-Babel init system like I do, you can just drop this file in there and add it to your list of modules.

Implementation

So, first we need a list of search engines. I define search engines to be a list containing the following items:

• A list of keyword names for the search engine
• A format string containing one %s where the url-encoded search term goes.

I created search-engines as a list of these search engines. You can customize them as much as you’d like. Also, search-engine-default is the keyword name of a default search engine, for when you don’t specify it in search-web.

(setq search-engines
      '(
        (("google" "g") "https://google.com/search?q=%s")
        (("duckduckgo" "d" "ddg") "https://duckduckgo.com/lite/?q=%s")
        (("rfc" "r") "https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc%s.txt")
        (("rfc-kw" "rk") "https://www.rfc-editor.org/search/rfc_search_detail.php?title=%s")
        ))
(setq search-engine-default "google")

Below is a nifty little recursive helper function to get a search engine’s url format string from a keyword.

(defun search-get-engine (engine-name engine-list)
  (cond
   ((null engine-list) nil)
   ((member engine-name (caar engine-list)) (cadar engine-list))
   (t (search-get-engine engine-name (cdr engine-list)))))

Now, all that’s left is the two interactive commands. The first will prompt for an engine, followed by a search term. If the search term is unknown, we’ll print an error message in the minibuffer, and fail.

(defun search-engine (engine-name term)
  "Search for a term using an engine."
  (interactive "MEngine: \nMTerm: ")
  (let* ((url (search-get-engine engine-name search-engines)))
    (if (equal url nil)
        (message "Error: search engine \"%s\" unknown." engine-name)
      (eww (format url (url-hexify-string term))))))

The second command is more of a “dwim” (i.e. do what I mean) command. It uses your default search engine when you don’t use a colon. When you do, it assumes that the first part is to specify your search engine (like this: “rfc:793”). If you’d like to use a colon in an actual search term, you’ll have to explicitly specify your search engine (even if you’d like to use the default).

(defun search-web (term)
  "Search the web using google or a specified engine."
  (interactive "MQuery: ")
  (let ((idx (position ?: term)))
    (if (equal idx nil)
        (search-engine search-engine-default term)
      (search-engine (subseq term 0 idx)
                     (subseq term (+ 1 idx))))))

To use this, you can always use M-x search-web. However, you may want to do it quicker. In that case, I think C-c w is a good choice for a shortcut:

(global-set-key (kbd "C-c w") 'search-web)