Export google search to a spreadsheet

excel google-search scrape
Colin Inskeep picture Colin Inskeep · Feb 10, 2014 · Viewed 25.6k times · Source

Is it possible for me to create a list of google search results from a specific query and export it into excel? For example, I'd like to google orthodontists in Florida and be able to export the business name, phone number and address to an excel spreadsheet. I've done a lot of searching but I can't find any solutions. I'm looking for someone to point me in the right direction. Any help is appreciated, thanks.

Answer

philshem picture philshem · Feb 10, 2014

An API is an Application Programming Interface and it's a way for your software to interact with the software on a server. Google has an API called the "Custom Search Engine" which you can use for 100 free queries per day. Other search engines may have more generous free APIs. With a search API you can write a code to download text that contain all the relevant data. You can read more about search engine APIs here.

Another way to collect data from google is to scrape their page. This means that you use a code to download the HTML, and from that HTML you collect the relevant pieces (wikipedia link). With a programming language like python, many people use the Beautiful Soup library for scraping. With code then you can take the relevant parts of the HTML and put it into a format like CSV that is readable by Excel. With python there are ways to write to Excel, directly, too (link).

Finally, here is a link from 2007 that says with Google Spreadsheets you can import HTML.

Update: here is the MS Excel version.

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