Google Search API PHP Example Tutorial with Demo to Get the First Web Pages and Images as a JSON Array

Contents

Introduction

How to Scrape Google Search Results using PHP

Google Search API Tutorial Using the PHP Google Custom Search API package 

Simple Google API PHP Example

Can I Use this Package to Implement a Google Indexing API PHP Client

How to Implement a PHP Google Keyword Ranking Position Finder to Implement a Search Engine Keyword Position Checker PHP Script

Conclusion

Introduction

The Google Search API lets you search for given keywords and receive the results in a JSON encoded array that you can easily process in PHP.

Google is the leading search engine. Its search API provides you the same quality of results that you are used to from the Google search engine site. Using some PHP loops and array searching methods you can get very good analysis to find out where are your golden keywords ranking.

How to Scrape Google Search Results using PHP

You should not try to scrape Google Search results pages because that is not the way officially supported by Google.

Scraping may overload Google server computers that serve Google Search results. That imposes a cost that Google needs to pay in terms of energy and servers that are necessary to provide Google search results to external applications.

Therefore, Google uses CAPTCHA solutions to avoid excessive accesses from robot scripts that scrape Google Search results.

The official way that Google allows to access search results is to use an official Google API. This article explains how you access Google Search results using the official Google API from PHP scripts.

Google Search API Tutorial Using the PHP Google Custom Search API package 

Google Search API enables you to send search queries 100 times a day for free. You can use it on your site but here we are using it for our applications. You can configure your search query to search both Web pages and images and you can fine-tune the ranking.

Using PHP Google Custom Search API package you can perform a search by passing in the search keywords plus an optional array of advanced search options to API call URL and get a response in JSON or ATOM.

Table of Search Options with URL Request Google API PHP CustomSearch Parameters 

Install the PHP Google CustomSearch Package using PHP Composer

With this class the work becomes very easy. You do not need to create any search URLs and process any hard JSON responses.

The first step to use this package it is to install it in your PHP environment.

You can install using a more traditional way just by downloading and extracting a compressed archive and use the require statement to include the CustomSearch.php function

You can use also use a more modern tool that is PHP composer. In this case, you need to have a composer.json file that includes the following configuration:

{
  "require":
  {
    "phpclasses/google-custom-search": ">=1.0.0"
  },
  "repositories":
  [
    {
      "type": "composer",
      "url": "https:\/\/www.phpclasses.org\/"
    },
    {
      "packagist": false
    }
  ]
}

Then you install or update the package using the following statement from the command line if you have PHP composer installed using the composer.phar archive:

php composer.phar update

From this point you can use the CustomSearch class or any other class installed using the PHP composer tool using the vendor/autoload.php script.

Simple Google API PHP Example

<?php

// If you installed this package using PHP composer,
// use the require_once statement below. 
require_once 'vendor/autoload.php';

// If you installed this package saving CustomSearch.php script in the
// current directory, uncomment the require_once statement below. 
// require_once 'CustomSearch.php';

use Fogg\Google\CustomSearch\CustomSearch;

// Initialize the search class 

$cs = new Fogg\Google\CustomSearch\CustomSearch\CustomSearch();

// Perform a simple search 
$response = $cs->simpleSearch( 'whole foods' );

The response will be an object with all the results for the keywords you send in the query, in this example "whole foods". You will need then search for your site in this array and you will get your position. Do that for all your keywords and you will get which keywords best suites for you.

Can I Use this Package to Implement a Google Indexing API PHP Client

The Google Indexing API is a different API. It is use to tell Google to index certain pages that were updated.

Currently, this package is for a different purpose, which is to perform custom searches using Google.

For using Google Indexing API or any other API, you may use the PHP OAuth Library package. It supports many types of API and can use refresh tokens to automatically use updated API access tokens, so you can use it with scripts that need to run without human intervention.

Here is an article on how to access APIs from PHP using OAuth without user interaction.

How to Implement a PHP Google Keyword Ranking Position Finder to Implement a Search Engine Keyword Position Checker PHP Script

This package can search of any keywords in Google. If you want to check the position of a given page in Google search results, you check the results of the simpleSearch class function until you find the page that you want to find the the position in Google for the given search keywords.

Conclusion

The PHP Google Custom Search API is a package that allows external applications to perform searches using the Google search engine. This class can perform arbitrary searches on Google using its custom search API.

Next part of this article you will learn how to perform advanced queries and how to find your Web site pages ranked in the Google search results.

If you liked this article or have questions about searching using the official Google Search API, post a comment here.