MSN Live Search Result Grabber

By  on  

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

Recent Features

  • By
    5 Ways that CSS and JavaScript Interact That You May Not Know About

    CSS and JavaScript:  the lines seemingly get blurred by each browser release.  They have always done a very different job but in the end they are both front-end technologies so they need do need to work closely.  We have our .js files and our .css, but...

  • By
    fetch API

    One of the worst kept secrets about AJAX on the web is that the underlying API for it, XMLHttpRequest, wasn't really made for what we've been using it for.  We've done well to create elegant APIs around XHR but we know we can do better.  Our effort to...

Incredible Demos

  • By
    Animated AJAX Record Deletion Using MooTools

    I'm a huge fan of WordPress' method of individual article deletion. You click the delete link, the menu item animates red, and the item disappears. Here's how to achieve that functionality with MooTools JavaScript. The PHP - Content & Header The following snippet goes at the...

  • By
    Create a Clearable TextBox with the Dojo Toolkit

    Usability is a key feature when creating user interfaces;  it's all in the details.  I was recently using my iPhone and it dawned on my how awesome the "x" icon is in its input elements.  No holding the delete key down.  No pressing it a...

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.

Wrap your code in <pre class="{language}"></pre> tags, link to a GitHub gist, JSFiddle fiddle, or CodePen pen to embed!