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
    Creating Scrolling Parallax Effects with CSS

    Introduction For quite a long time now websites with the so called "parallax" effect have been really popular. In case you have not heard of this effect, it basically includes different layers of images that are moving in different directions or with different speed. This leads to a...

  • By
    7 Essential JavaScript Functions

    I remember the early days of JavaScript where you needed a simple function for just about everything because the browser vendors implemented features differently, and not just edge features, basic features, like addEventListener and attachEvent.  Times have changed but there are still a few functions each developer should...

Incredible Demos

  • By
    Styling CSS Print Page Breaks

    It's important to construct your websites in a fashion that lends well to print. I use a page-break CSS class on my websites to tell the browser to insert a page break at strategic points on the page. During the development of my...

  • By
    Drag &#038; Drop Elements to the Trash with MooTools 1.2

    Everyone loves dragging garbage files from their desktop into their trash can. There's a certain amount of irony in doing something on your computer that you also do in real life. It's also a quick way to get rid of things. That's...

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!