easiest (legal) way to programmatically get the google search result count?

Question

I want to get the estimated result count for certain Google search engine queries (on the whole web) using Java code.

I need to do only very few queries per day, so

Answer 1

Well something you can do is perform an actual Google search programmatically to begin with. The easiest possible way to do this would be to access the url https://www.google.com/search?q=QUERY_HERE and then you want to scrape the result count off that page.

Here is a quick example of how to do that:

    private static int getResultsCount(final String query) throws IOException {
    final URL url = new URL("https://www.google.com/search?q=" + URLEncoder.encode(query, "UTF-8"));
    final URLConnection connection = url.openConnection();
    connection.setConnectTimeout(60000);
    connection.setReadTimeout(60000);
    connection.addRequestProperty("User-Agent", "Mozilla/5.0");
    final Scanner reader = new Scanner(connection.getInputStream(), "UTF-8");
    while(reader.hasNextLine()){
        final String line = reader.nextLine();
        if(!line.contains("<div id=\"resultStats\">"))
            continue;
        try{
            return Integer.parseInt(line.split("<div id=\"resultStats\">")[1].split("<")[0].replaceAll("[^\\d]", ""));
        }finally{
            reader.close();
        }
    }
    reader.close();
    return 0;
}

For usage, you would do something like:

final int count = getResultsCount("horses");
System.out.println("Estimated number of results for horses: " + count);

Answer 2

/**** @author RAJESH Kharche */
//open Netbeans
//Choose Java->prject
//name it GoogleSearchAPP

package googlesearchapp;

import java.io.*;
import java.net.*;
import java.util.*;
import java.util.logging.Level;
import java.util.logging.Logger;

public class GoogleSearchAPP {
    public static void main(String[] args) {
        try {
            // TODO code application logic here

            final int Result;

            Scanner s1=new Scanner(System.in);
            String Str;
            System.out.println("Enter Query to search: ");//get the query to search
            Str=s1.next();
            Result=getResultsCount(Str);

            System.out.println("Results:"+ Result);
        } catch (IOException ex) {
            Logger.getLogger(GoogleSearchAPP.class.getName()).log(Level.SEVERE, null, ex);
        }      
    }

    private static int getResultsCount(final String query) throws IOException {
        final URL url;
        url = new URL("https://www.google.com/search?q=" + URLEncoder.encode(query, "UTF-8"));
        final URLConnection connection = url.openConnection();

        connection.setConnectTimeout(60000);
        connection.setReadTimeout(60000);
        connection.addRequestProperty("User-Agent", "Google Chrome/36");//put the browser name/version

        final Scanner reader = new Scanner(connection.getInputStream(), "UTF-8");  //scanning a buffer from object returned by http request

        while(reader.hasNextLine()){   //for each line in buffer
            final String line = reader.nextLine();

            if(!line.contains("\"resultStats\">"))//line by line scanning for "resultstats" field because we want to extract number after it
                continue;

            try{        
                return Integer.parseInt(line.split("\"resultStats\">")[1].split("<")[0].replaceAll("[^\\d]", ""));//finally extract the number convert from string to integer
            }finally{
                reader.close();
            }
        }
        reader.close();
        return 0;
    }
}