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
    Convert XML to JSON with JavaScript

    If you follow me on Twitter, you know that I've been working on a super top secret mobile application using Appcelerator Titanium.  The experience has been great:  using JavaScript to create easy to write, easy to test, native mobile apps has been fun.  My...

  • By
    Page Visibility API

    One event that's always been lacking within the document is a signal for when the user is looking at a given tab, or another tab. When does the user switch off our site to look at something else? When do they come back?

Incredible Demos

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!