Search Google from the powershell console

February 09, 2020

You may have seen people walking around with those awkwardEat; Sleep; Code; Repeat; brogrammer shirts. I don’t like them - between the many other things that developing software requires, when I actually sit down to write code the workflow would more accurately be described as Code; Compile; Google Error; Repeat;.

This short post explains how the below gg.ps1 Powershell script can increase your productivity by opening a chrome browser and executing a Google search straight from the Powershell console.

If no arguments are passed to the function, it will Google whatever is in the clipboard, reducing keystrokes required to ctrl+c,gg,enter.

# Function name is used to call the function after importing this script
Function gg
{
<# .Synopsis
    Open Chrome browser and search for the [-SearchString] argument.
    If [-SearchString] not provided, defaults to clipboard contents.
    Requires Google Chrome browser to be installed with "chrome.exe" in the system path.
    Example usage:
        gg "your search terms"
#>
    param (
        [parameter(mandatory=$false, Position=0)] `
        [String]$SearchString
    )
    process {
        if (!$SearchString){
            $SearchString = Get-Clipboard;
        }
        $URL = $SearchString -replace ' ','+';
        $URL = "https://www.google.com/search?q=" + $URL;
        echo ("Searching Google for <" + $SearchString + ">...");
        start chrome.exe $URL;
    }
}

To automatically import this function whenever Powershell is started, see my post “Use Powershell Profiles Like a Pro”.