Google Command Line Script

Overview

Today’s post will show how you can make a Google Command Line script with Python (version 2.7.x)

“”” Note: The Google Web Search API has been officially deprecated as of November 1, 2010. It will continue to work as per our deprecation policy, but the number of requests you may make per day will be limited. Therefore, we encourage you to move to the new Custom Search API. “””

To make a request to the Web search API, we have to import the modules that we need.

urllib2
Loads the URL response

urllib
To make use of urlencode

json
Google returns JSON

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Next we specify the URL for which we do the request too: http://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/services/search/web?v=1.0&

To make it a bit interactive, we will ask the user for input and save the result to a variable that we name “query”.

query = raw_input("What do you want to search for ? >> ")

Create the response object by loading the URL response, including the query we asked for above.

response = urllib2.urlopen (url + query ).read()

# Process the JSON string. data = json.loads (response)

From this point we can play around with the results

GoogleSearch.py

Let’s see the complete script

import urllib2
import urllib
import json

url = "http://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/services/search/web?v=1.0&"

query = raw_input("What do you want to search for ? >> ")

query = urllib.urlencode( {'q' : query } )

response = urllib2.urlopen (url + query ).read()

data = json.loads ( response )

results = data [ 'responseData' ] [ 'results' ]

for result in results:
    title = result['title']
    url = result['url']
    print ( title + '; ' + url )

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