MSN Live Search Result Grabber

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Within the last month, I've created two popular SEO tools: Google Grabber and Yahoo Grabber. Each grabber goes to the respective website and retrieves the number of pages a specified domain has indexed in the search engine. Having the indexed number of pages so quickly and easily is invaluable and a great sales tool.

Though MSN Live Search isn't a powerhouse search engine / portal, I thought I'd throw in the effort to put one together for Microsoft's search engine.

The PHP Code

/* return result number */
function get_msn_results($domain = 'davidwalsh.name')
{
	// get the result content
	$content = file_get_contents('http://search.msn.com/results.aspx?q=site%3A'.$domain);

	// parse to get results
	$pages = get_match('/id="count">(.*)</span>/isU',$content);

	//explode, get rid of "of"
	$pages = explode('of ',$pages);

	$return['pages'] = $pages[1] ? $pages[1] : 0;

	// return result
	return $return;
}

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

The Usage

$domains = array('davidwalsh.name','digg.com','msn.com','cnn.com','dzone.com','some-domain-that-doesnt-exist.com');
foreach($domains as $domain)
{
	$result = get_msn_results($domain);
	echo $domain,': ',$result['pages'],'<br />';
}

//davidwalsh.name: 431
//digg.com: 9,610,000
//msn.com: 28,100,000
//cnn.com: 17,100,000
//dzone.com: 138,000
//some-domain-that-doesnt-exist.com: 0

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Discussion

  1. Interesting that MSN turns up significantly more results for all my websites than Google does. Good work, David!

  2. I noticed that too Eric. MSN always turns up a whoooooole lot more than Goooooooogle.

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