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Welcome to the David Walsh Blog. I'm a MooTools, Dojo, jQuery, CSS, and PHP Web Developer located in Madison, Wisconsin, United States. Please contact me if I can make your experience on my website better.

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

7 Responses »

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

Discussion

  1. March 16, 2008 @ 7:24 pm

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

  2. March 16, 2008 @ 7:42 pm

    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.

  3. kenny
    October 4, 2008 @ 7:56 pm

    Hi, David,

    I don’t know much about php, but your codes seems very usefull, can you tell me how do I put this in action?

    thanks.

  4. March 17, 2009 @ 9:38 am

    I definitely love you … ^^ … thats a quick way :-).

  5. kenny
    April 3, 2009 @ 7:28 am

    Hi, David,

    How do i put it in action please?

    thank you.

  6. concerned...
    December 29, 2009 @ 9:15 pm

    Just a quick one as I stumbled over this whilst looking around…

    You do realise that this may count as using the Google servers/services in an automated fashion – which would be against G’s Terms of Service?

  7. tope
    June 2, 2010 @ 1:02 am

    This script does not work again. Google as change their result format. PLEASE, update.

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