Quickly google for something in vim (uses visual text selection for the query)

.vimrc

" get visually selected words/lines
function! GetVisualSelection()
  let [lnum1, col1] = getpos("'<")[1:2]
  let [lnum2, col2] = getpos("'>")[1:2]
  let lines = getline(lnum1, lnum2)
  let lines[-1] = lines[-1][: col2 - (&selection == 'inclusive' ? 1 : 2)]
  let lines[0] = lines[0][col1 - 1:]
  return join(lines, ' ')
endfunction

" search highlighted text (single line or word) with Google
function! GoogleSearch()
  let selection = GetVisualSelection()
  let query = substitute(selection, '[[:space:]]', '+', 'g')
  silent! exe '!open "http://google.com/search?q=' . query . '" > /dev/null 2>&1' | redraw!
endfunction

vmap ?? :call GoogleSearch()<cr>

👍 then you realise there's a plugin for this already

Still learnt a lot of stuff though :)