easiest (legal) way to programmatically get the google search result count?

Question

I want to get the estimated result count for certain Google search engine queries (on the whole web) using Java code.

I need to do only very few queries per day, so

Answer 1

Well something you can do is perform an actual Google search programmatically to begin with. The easiest possible way to do this would be to access the url https://www.google.com/search?q=QUERY_HERE and then you want to scrape the result count off that page.

Here is a quick example of how to do that:

    private static int getResultsCount(final String query) throws IOException {
    final URL url = new URL("https://www.google.com/search?q=" + URLEncoder.encode(query, "UTF-8"));
    final URLConnection connection = url.openConnection();
    connection.setConnectTimeout(60000);
    connection.setReadTimeout(60000);
    connection.addRequestProperty("User-Agent", "Mozilla/5.0");
    final Scanner reader = new Scanner(connection.getInputStream(), "UTF-8");
    while(reader.hasNextLine()){
        final String line = reader.nextLine();
        if(!line.contains("
"))
            continue;
        try{
            return Integer.parseInt(line.split("
")[1].split("<")[0].replaceAll("[^\\d]", ""));
        }finally{
            reader.close();
        }
    }
    reader.close();
    return 0;
}

For usage, you would do something like:

final int count = getResultsCount("horses");
System.out.println("Estimated number of results for horses: " + count);