Search the web with dynamic suggestions and browse the results – all from the comfort of Emacs and ivy.

The main idea in counsel-web is to not have to browse search results in a browser–instead go directly to the page you were searching for. It accomplishes that in two steps:

1. counsel-web-suggest prompts for a search string, displays dynamic suggestions, and passes the chosen suggestion to:
2. counsel-web-search, which takes a search string and browses a search candidate.

counsel-web-suggest shows search suggestions as you type. Press RET to accept the suggestion and send it to counsel-web-search.

counsel-web-search searches and presents the results in the ivy minibuffer.

• Press RET to browse to the selected result.
• Type a new search and press C-j to update the search.
• Press C-M-j (ivy-alternate-action) to choose a secondary action.
• Press M-o to choose from a menu of alternate actions.

To open the selected result in the operating system browser instead of Emacs:

(setq counsel-web-search-action #'browse-url)

(setq counsel-web-search-alternate-action #'w3m)

DuckDuckGo and Google are built in. DuckDuckGo is the default. Change to Google like this:

(setq counsel-web-engine 'google)

See counsel-web-engine-alist to learn how to add more search engines.

Experimental! To update the search (not suggestions–the actual search results) with each key press:

(setq counsel-web-search-dynamic-update t)

Note that dynamic updates can sometimes lead the search engine to temporarily block requests if it decides Emacs is a running a search robot. This seems to be a bigger problem with DuckDuckGo than with Google. Suggestions regarding how to fix this are welcome.

1. Install counsel version 0.13.0 or later.
2. Clone this repository, add it to load-path, and require it.

(add-to-list 'load-path "/path/to/counsel-web")
(require 'counsel-web)

1. Optionally, create some key bindings.

;; Define "C-c w" as a prefix key.
(defvar counsel-web-map
  (let ((map (make-sparse-keymap "counsel-web")))
    (define-key map (kbd "w") #'counsel-web-suggest)
    (define-key map (kbd "s") #'counsel-web-search)
    (define-key map (kbd ".") #'counsel-web-thing-at-point)
    map))
(global-set-key (kbd "C-c w") counsel-web-map)

counsel-search is very similar to counsel-web-suggest. However, counsel currently does not provide an equivalent to counsel-web-search.

https://github.com/Malabarba/emacs-google-this Google this searches Google for things under point, somewhat similar to counsel-web-thing-at-point. However, it does not have equivalent functions to counsel-web-suggest or counsel-web-search.

https://github.com/hrs/engine-mode Engine-mode sends a search to the browser, it doesn’t parse the search and results in Emacs.

https://framagit.org/steckerhalter/helm-google The most similar, it displays search results in the helm buffer like counse-web does in the ivy minibuffer.

counsel-web is released under the GNU General Public License 3.0.