Scraping Keyword Suggestions from Google

php, web-scraping

Solution

This is valid JSON, use `json_decode` and you are done!

var_dump(json_decode('["money",["moneygram","money network","money mutual","money trees lyrics","moneyball","moneypak","money","money converter","money order","money2india"]]'));

edit - complete example;

<?php

function getKeywordSuggestionsFromGoogle($keyword) {
    $keywords = array();
    $data = file_get_contents('http://suggestqueries.google.com/complete/search?output=firefox&client=firefox&hl=en-US&q='.urlencode($keyword));
    if (($data = json_decode($data, true)) !== null) {
        $keywords = $data[1];
    }

    return $keywords;
}

var_dump(getKeywordSuggestionsFromGoogle('money'));

Problem

I'm currently working to scrape keyword suggestion from Google. This is the script I'm working with: ``` <?php function text_between($start,$end,$string) { if ($start != '') {$temp = explode($start,$string,2);} else {$temp = array('',$string);} $temp = explode($end,$temp[1],2); return $temp[0]; } function gsscrape($keyword) { $keyword=str_replace(" ","+",$keyword); global $kw; $data=file_get_contents('http://suggestqueries.google.com/complete/search?output=firefox&client=firefox&hl=en-US&q='.$keyword); $data=explode('[',$data,3); $data=explode('],[',$data[2]); foreach($data as $temp) { $kw[]= text_between('"','"',$temp); } } #simple to use, just use yourscriptname.php?keywords if ($_SERVER['QUERY_STRING']!='') { gsscrape($_SERVER['QUERY_STRING']); foreach ($kw as $keyword) { gsscrape($keyword); } //sorted and duplicates removed sort(array_unique($kw)); #all results echoed with break foreach ($kw as $keywords) { echo $keywords. "<br />"; } } ?> ``` When accessing directly through the URL Google will give me this response for the keyword `money`: ``` ["money",["moneygram","money network","money mutual","money trees lyrics","moneyball","moneypak","money","money converter","money order","money2india"]] ``` However, for some reason when I test it on my website, it's just showing this: ``` moneygram moneygram ``` What needs to be changed so that it displayed each of the keywords like this? ``` moneygram, money network, money mutual, money trees lyrics, moneyball, moneypak, money, money converter, money order, money2india ```

Original source