CODEWITHSUNDEEP
javascriptphpsearch
Max
Max

Reputation: 21

Request Google Search results with Javascript/PHP

I want to complement my webservice with a list of results provided by Google Search. My target is to receive the first 10-20 results by specifying some keywords and some other information (data range for example).

What possibilities do I have? Can this even be realised only by using client-side technology like Javascript? Or do I eventually have to rely on a dynamically loaded PHP script which loads and analyses the HTML code by using cURL?

Upvotes: 2

Views: 8141

Answers (2)

WebChemist
WebChemist

Reputation: 4411

This is how I've done it in the past with a cURL request and the Google AJAX API:

function getResults($term,$page = 0){
    $googleurl = "http://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/services/search/web?v=1.0&q=".(str_replace(' ','+',$term);
    if($page >0){
        $googleurl .= "&start=".($page*10);
    }
    $ch = curl_init();
    curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL,$googleurl);   
    curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1);
    $Page_Contents = curl_exec($ch);
    curl_close($ch);
    return $Page_Contents;
}
$keywordCheck = array('ajax','php','cURL','other search terms');

foreach($keywordCheck as $wordKey => $wordValue){
    $term = str_replace(' ','+',$wordValue);
    for($i =0; $i < 5; $i++){
        $page = getResults($term,$i);
        if(preg_match("/mysite.com/",$page)){
            $links = explode('GsearchResultClass',$page);
            foreach ($links as $key => $value){
                if(preg_match("/mysite.com/",$value)){
                    preg_match("/url\":\"([^\"]*)\",/",$value,$match);
                    $match = str_replace('",','',str_replace('url":"','',$match[0]));
                    $results[$wordValue] .= $wordValue. ' is ranked #'.(($i*10)+($key)).': '.$match.'<br/>';
                }
            }
        }
    }
    sleep(2);
}

then in in the page body:

<div id="results">
    <?php foreach($results as $key => $value){
        if($value == ''){
            echo '<p>'.$key.' not found in top 50 results</p>';
    }
    else{
        echo '<p>'.$value.'</p>';
    }
    }?>
</div>

Some points to understand:

1) Use sleep() to pause between queries to avoid getting banned for overburdening the server

2) Last time I checked, the search api limits you to 1000 queries per day, so plan accordingly

3) The API queries a different database than the www.google.com, so results might be slightly different then what you see when you do a normal search

This script just checks the position(s) of my urls on certain keywords I want to monitor the position of within the first 50 results... obviously you would need to make adjustments if you were not focused on 1 site...

to add custom filters, just do an "advanced" search and look at the query string, its the same for the API. Just append as needed, like for a date range of Jan 1 2011 - Jan 24 2011:

$googleurl .= '&tbs=cdr%3A1%2Ccd_min%3A1%2F4%2F2011%2Ccd_max%3A1%2F24%2F2011';

Upvotes: 1

eykanal
eykanal

Reputation: 27057

You want to check out their JSON search API (which is a part of their larger custom search API). The example on that page is in javascript, but you could just as easily implement that in php.

Upvotes: 1

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