Looking for a "text mode browser" (good description????)

[Richard Owlett <rowlett@cloud85.net>]

Darac's answer to answer to a previous question led me to try
> https://html.duckduckgo.com/html?q=%2Bintitle%3Afaq%20site%3Adebian.org
which gave me the content I needed, but not in a convenient format.

I would like to pipe search results to a text processor.
Synaptic led me to "surfraw" and "w3m".
Documentation for "w3m" was more use user friendly, so I installed it.

Following a man page example I got:

> richard@defaultinstall:~$ $ w3m -M http://w3m.sourceforge.net
> bash: $: command not found
> richard@defaultinstall:~$ su
> Password: 
> root@defaultinstall:/home/richard# $ w3m -M http://w3m.sourceforge.net
> bash: $: command not found
> root@defaultinstall:/home/richard# 

Why? Suggestions to reach my goal?
TIA