r google search result count retrieve

Question

Searching google with keywords "health hospital" returns about 1,150,000,000 results. How can this count be obtained programmatically in R?

I have seen this link where they try to solve it using Java. How can this be done in R? An example code snippet would be appreciated.

Thanks.

One starting point would be to try webscraping, and for that the `rvest` package is a prob the best bet. `rvest::html('https://www.google.com/search?q=QUERY_HERE')` BUT, I think that's disallowed by google, since it gives you a 403 forbidden error. No doubt you saw the relevant commentary about that in the SO thread linked. The accepted answer uses a spoof user-agent, but that's almost certainly not officially allowed — arvi1000, May 12 '15 at 21:15
Take a look at the code in `http://www.l_m_g_t_f_y.com/?q=%22health+hospital%22 ... without the underscores because there is SO nanny-code that blocks that particular acronym. — IRTFM, May 12 '15 at 22:00
Valid question in my opinion, it features an example and an expected output, and it's useful to R users. — moodymudskipper, Apr 12 '19 at 14:41

Jota · Accepted Answer · 2015-05-13T03:51:57.583

Modifying just one line of the code found on theBioBucket blog post: Get No. of Google Search Hits with R and XML:

GoogleHits <- function(input)
   {
    require(XML)
    require(RCurl)
    url <- paste("https://www.google.com/search?q=",
                 input, sep = "") # modified line      
    CAINFO = paste(system.file(package="RCurl"), "/CurlSSL/ca-bundle.crt", sep = "")
    script <- getURL(url, followlocation = TRUE, cainfo = CAINFO)
    doc <- htmlParse(script)
    res <- xpathSApply(doc, '//*/div[@id="resultStats"]', xmlValue)
    cat(paste("\nYour Search URL:\n", url, "\n", sep = ""))
    cat("\nNo. of Hits:\n") # get rid of cat text if not wanted
    return(as.integer(gsub("[^0-9]", "", res)))
   }

# Example:
no.hits <- GoogleHits("health%20hospital")
#Your Search URL:
#https://www.google.com/search?q=health%20hospital
#
#No. of Hits:
no.hits
#[1] 1170000000

I changed the url assignment from

url <- paste("https://www.google.com/search?q=\"", input, "\"", sep = "")

to

url <- paste("https://www.google.com/search?q=", input, sep = "")

r google search result count retrieve

1 Answers1

Linked