There are many articles on the web telling you to install and compile Go from source. That’s a perfectly valid option but overkill if you simply need some Go apps.

Without further ado the simple method of installing Go on Ubuntu (zsh is assumed, for bash use .bashrc instead of .zshrc):

apt-get install golang
echo 'export GOPATH=~/go' >> ~/.zshrc
. ~/.zshrc
mkdir -p "$GOPATH"

And you’re done. Now you can easily install packages such as the platinum search:
[bash]go get -u github.com/monochromegane/the_platinum_searcher/…[/bash]