Google Grabber — Using PHP to Find Out How Many Pages Your Domain Has Listed in Google

Written by David Walsh on Wednesday, January 23, 2008

Most bloggers make an effort to get as many pages listed on Google as possible. Benefits of being listed in Google may include:

Increased blog visits
Increased ad clicks
Broadened visitors / audience
Increased article comments
Increased referral revenues

Using a short amount of PHP code, you can query Google to retrieve the number of pages your domain has listed in Google.

The Code

/* return result number */
function get_google_results($domain = 'davidwalsh.name')
{
	// get the result content
	$content = file_get_contents('http://www.google.com/search?q=site:'.$domain);

	// parse to get results
	$result = get_match('/Results <b>(.*)from/isU',$content);

	// split the results
	$split1 = explode('of about',$result);

	// return result
	return $split1[1] ? strip_tags($split1[1]) : 0;
}

/* helper: does the regex */
function get_match($regex,$content)
{
	preg_match($regex,$content,$matches);
	return $matches[1];
}

The Usage

/* do it! */
echo 'davidwalsh.name: '.get_google_results('davidwalsh.name'); // 164
echo 'digg.com: '.get_google_results('digg.com'); // 3,790,000
echo 'google.com: '.get_google_results('google.com'); // 19,300,000
echo 'cnn.com: '.get_google_results('cnn.com'); // 2,180,000
echo 'imdb.com: '.get_google_results('imdb.com'); // 19,000,000
echo 'dzone.com: '.get_google_results('dzone.com'); // 484,000
echo 'fark.com: '.get_google_results('fark.com'); // 7,390
echo 'some-domain-that-doesnt-exist.com: '.get_google_results('some-domain-that-doesnt-exist'); // 0

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Follow via RSS Epic Discussion

March 16 / #

Jason Spence says:

Or, you could just register your site with Google Webmaster tools at: http://www.google.com/webmasters/tools.

March 16 / #

david says:

True. I’m not a big fan of Google’s Webmaster Tools. Plus, with my grabber, I can loop through all 100+ customer domains and get the information quicker than navigating through GWT.