Google Hack – How to Search Google Without Copy And Paste!

The guys over at Lifehacker have done a marvelous job of eliminating copy & pasting keyword searches.  Whether you are on your MS Word or any other application, you can use AutoHotKey to eliminate the “paste” part when you want to search for something.

Sincerely,
Tired of Copy/Paste

Dear Tired of Copy/Paste,

Using the AutoHotkey scripting language we can throw together a tiny script that assigns the Ctrl+Shift+C shortcut key combination to automate coping the text to the clipboard, and then opens your default web browser with the Google search for the selected text.

You’ll want to start by downloading and installing AutoHotkey, and then simply create a new file with the *.ahk extension and paste in the following text, which uses the magic %clipboard% variable in the Google URL to pass in the search terms.


#InstallKeybdHook
#Persistent
#HotkeyInterval,100
SetKeyDelay, -1^+c::
{
Send, ^c
Sleep 50
Run, http://www.google.com/search?q=%clipboard%
Return
}

Once you’ve saved the file you can run it by double-clicking on the script, which will add a new icon to the system tray. If you want to remove the tray icon and have the script run completely in the background, add the following line to the beginning:

#NoTrayIconNow that the script is active, you can simply select text in any application, use Ctrl+Shift+C, and you’ll instantly see a Google search window for that term. If you want to use a different search engine, you can simply modify the URL line, or add a new hotkey (see the AHK Hotkey documentation).

via lifehacker

2 Responses to Google Hack – How to Search Google Without Copy And Paste!

1. Arun says:

   February 26, 2010 at 2:13 am

   Hi,

   I found this quite helpful. Every time I click the combination it opens another window. Is there any way that I can ensure that every time it opens google only in the same window?

   Thanks in advance.
2. max says:

   February 26, 2010 at 1:23 pm

   You can try fiddling with your browser options, you can set it so it only opens windows in the same window in Firefox. If you need help, I will do a quick blog post on that.