I've been searching for a solution to allow me to instantly search Google from anywhere on my Mac. My goal is to access the result I want as fast as possible.
My previous solution was to use the default fallback search in Alfred. I hit Option-Space typed my search and pressed Enter. This was pretty good. It would open Safari with my query's Google results. The page would take two seconds to load and then I'd have to figure out how to select the result I wanted.
Ideally, I'd just press 1, 2, 3, etc on my keyboard to launch the corresponding result. But the closest I could find was a vim-like browser plugin (such as Vimari) which gives all links a letter combination to type to navigate to it. Or Shortcat, which I use for navigating all macOS UI.1
This solution wasn't fast enough for me though. I wanted a more modal experience where I hop into an ephemeral search session.
Enter googler
In my search for instantly navigating Google results, I came across googler which displays google results on the command line. You can type a number followed by Enter and it opens your default browser to that result. Getting closer.
After looking for an existing solution and turning up empty, I decided to make my own via Alfred Workflows.
I really liked googler and essentially wanted to interface with it through Alfred. So I picked up my favorite programming language, and started writing. The end result is Alfred googler. Here's a demo:
Check out the README for info on installation and features.