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=

Brave

https://search.brave.com/search?q=&source=web

Bing

https://www.bing.com/search?q=

Yahoo

https://search.yahoo.com/search?p=

GitHub

https://github.com/search?q=&type=repositories

Reddit

https://www.reddit.com/search/?q=

Reddit (less JS-heavy fallback)

https://old.reddit.com/search?q=

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 &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 &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 " \n Saved: %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