Lynx Web Search

Overview

Use lynx as a fast text-only fallback for web search and page retrieval.

This skill focuses on two repeatable tasks:

• Search engines from the terminal

• Fetch a URL and save a readable dump in /tmp

When to Use

• Need quick web search from shell without GUI/browser automation

• Dedicated web tooling is unavailable

• Need plain-text output for analysis/summarization

• Need deterministic saved artifacts in /tmp

When NOT to use:

• JavaScript-heavy pages requiring interaction/login flows

• Visual testing or DOM inspection (use browser automation tools)

Quick Reference

Engine URL templates

Engine URL template

Google https://www.google.com/search?q=<query>

Brave https://search.brave.com/search?q=<query>&source=web

Bing https://www.bing.com/search?q=<query>

Yahoo https://search.yahoo.com/search?p=<query>

GitHub https://github.com/search?q=<query>&type=repositories

Reddit https://www.reddit.com/search/?q=<query>

Reddit (less JS-heavy fallback) https://old.reddit.com/search?q=<query>

Core lynx flags from man lynx

• -dump : render readable text and exit

• -source : dump raw source and exit

• -listonly : output links list only (good for extracting URLs)

• -accept_all_cookies : avoid cookie prompts

• -useragent=... : override UA when sites block default behavior

Implementation

1. Search any engine and save output to /tmp

engine="brave" # google|brave|bing|yahoo|github|reddit|oldreddit query="lynx cli usage" q=$(python - <<'PY' "$query" import sys, urllib.parse print(urllib.parse.quote_plus(sys.argv[1])) PY )

case "$engine" in google) url="https://www.google.com/search?q=$q" ;; brave) url="https://search.brave.com/search?q=$q&#x26;source=web" ;; bing) url="https://www.bing.com/search?q=$q" ;; yahoo) url="https://search.yahoo.com/search?p=$q" ;; github) url="https://github.com/search?q=$q&#x26;type=repositories" ;; reddit) url="https://www.reddit.com/search/?q=$q" ;; oldreddit) url="https://old.reddit.com/search?q=$q" ;; *) echo "Unknown engine: $engine" >&2; exit 2 ;; esac

out="/tmp/lynx-search-${engine}-$(date +%Y%m%d-%H%M%S).txt" lynx -accept_all_cookies -dump "$url" | tee "$out" printf "\nSaved: %s\n" "$out"

2. Fetch a given URL and save readable dump to /tmp

url="https://example.com" out="/tmp/lynx-page-$(date +%Y%m%d-%H%M%S).txt" lynx -accept_all_cookies -dump "$url" > "$out" printf "Saved readable dump: %s\n" "$out"

3. Optional: save raw HTML/source to /tmp

url="https://example.com" out="/tmp/lynx-source-$(date +%Y%m%d-%H%M%S).html" lynx -source "$url" > "$out" printf "Saved source dump: %s\n" "$out"

Common Mistakes

• Forgetting URL encoding for multi-word queries → use urllib.parse.quote_plus

• Assuming Google always works in text mode (often blocked/JS challenge)

• Using only one engine when blocked → retry with Brave/Bing/Yahoo/GitHub/old Reddit

• Not saving outputs → always write to /tmp/lynx-*.txt for traceability

• Expecting JS-rendered content from lynx → use browser automation for dynamic pages