Google Search from a Python App

Question

I'm trying to run a google search query from a python app. Is there any python interface out there that would let me do this? If there isn't does anyone know which Google API will enable me to do this. Thanks.

Answer 1

There's a simple example here (peculiarly missing some quotes;-). Most of what you'll see on the web is Python interfaces to the old, discontinued SOAP API -- the example I'm pointing to uses the newer and supported AJAX API, that's definitely the one you want!-)

Edit: here's a more complete Python 2.6 example with all the needed quotes &c-)...:

#!/usr/bin/python
import json
import urllib

def showsome(searchfor):
  query = urllib.urlencode({'q': searchfor})
  url = 'http://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/services/search/web?v=1.0&%s' % query
  search_response = urllib.urlopen(url)
  search_results = search_response.read()
  results = json.loads(search_results)
  data = results['responseData']
  print 'Total results: %s' % data['cursor']['estimatedResultCount']
  hits = data['results']
  print 'Top %d hits:' % len(hits)
  for h in hits: print ' ', h['url']
  print 'For more results, see %s' % data['cursor']['moreResultsUrl']

showsome('ermanno olmi')