How to get google search results

r hyperlink rcurl

15,223

Solution 1

If you look at the htmlvariable, you can see that the search result links all are nested in <h3 class="r"> tags.

Try to change your getGoogleLinks function to:

getGoogleLinks <- function(google.url) {
   doc <- getURL(google.url, httpheader = c("User-Agent" = "R
                                             (2.10.0)"))
   html <- htmlTreeParse(doc, useInternalNodes = TRUE, error=function
                          (...){})
   nodes <- getNodeSet(html, "//h3[@class='r']//a")
   return(sapply(nodes, function(x) x <- xmlAttrs(x)[["href"]]))
}

Solution 2

I created this function to read in a list of company names and then get the top website result for each. It will get you started then you can adjust it as needed.

#libraries.
library(URLencode)
library(rvest)

#load data
d <-read.csv("P:\\needWebsites.csv")
c <- as.character(d$Company.Name)

# Function for getting website.
getWebsite <- function(name)
{
    url = URLencode(paste0("https://www.google.com/search?q=",name))

    page <- read_html(url)

    results <- page %>% 
      html_nodes("cite") %>% # Get all notes of type cite. You can change this to grab other node types.
      html_text()

    result <- results[1]

    return(as.character(result)) # Return results if you want to see them all.
}

# Apply the function to a list of company names.
websites <- data.frame(Website = sapply(c,getWebsite))]

Solution 3

other solutions here don't work for me, here's my take on @Bryce-Chamberlain's issue which works for me in August 2019, it answers also another closed question : company name to URL in R


# install.packages("rvest")

get_first_google_link <- function(name, root = TRUE) {
  url = URLencode(paste0("https://www.google.com/search?q=",name))
  page <- xml2::read_html(url)
  # extract all links
  nodes <- rvest::html_nodes(page, "a")
  links <- rvest::html_attr(nodes,"href")
  # extract first link of the search results
  link <- links[startsWith(links, "/url?q=")][1]
  # clean it
  link <- sub("^/url\\?q\\=(.*?)\\&sa.*$","\\1", link)
  # get root if relevant
  if(root) link <- sub("^(https?://.*?/).*$", "\\1", link)
  link
}

companies <- data.frame(company = c("apple acres llc","abbvie inc","apple inc"))
companies <- transform(companies, url = sapply(company,get_first_google_link))
companies
#>           company                            url
#> 1 apple acres llc https://www.appleacresllc.com/
#> 2      abbvie inc        https://www.abbvie.com/
#> 3       apple inc         https://www.apple.com/

^{Created on 2019-08-10 by the reprex package (v0.2.1)}

15,223

Avi

Updated on July 13, 2022

Comments

Avi almost 2 years

I used the following code:

library(XML)
library(RCurl)
getGoogleURL <- function(search.term, domain = '.co.uk', quotes=TRUE) 
    {
    search.term <- gsub(' ', '%20', search.term)
    if(quotes) search.term <- paste('%22', search.term, '%22', sep='') 
        getGoogleURL <- paste('http://www.google', domain, '/search?q=',
        search.term, sep='')
    }

    getGoogleLinks <- function(google.url) 
    {
       doc <- getURL(google.url, httpheader = c("User-Agent" = "R(2.10.0)"))
       html <- htmlTreeParse(doc, useInternalNodes = TRUE, error=function(...){})
       nodes <- getNodeSet(html, "//a[@href][@class='l']")
       return(sapply(nodes, function(x) x <- xmlAttrs(x)[[1]]))
    }

search.term <- "cran"
quotes <- "FALSE"
search.url <- getGoogleURL(search.term=search.term, quotes=quotes)

links <- getGoogleLinks(search.url)

I would like to find all the links that resulted from my search and I get the following result:

> links
list()

How can I get the links? In addition I would like to get the headlines and summary of google results how can I get it? And finally is there a way to get the links that resides in ChillingEffects.org results?

hrbrmstr over 8 years

stackoverflow.com/a/22703153/1457051

Therii almost 5 years

Hello Bryce Sir. I have written a program taking a inspiration from ur program. But I'm getting character 0. Plzz help.
Therii almost 5 years

r_h = read_html("google.com/…) ; d = r_h %>% html_nodes(".iUh30") %>% html_text() %>% as.character()
hoang tran almost 5 years

Hi, I do exactly the same thing but my nodes equals NULL. What could be wrong? Thank you!
hoang tran almost 5 years

Can you please also explain me how to choose the "//h3[@class='r']//a", based on what?
user3794498 almost 5 years

Google has changed their website, so the results are no longer nested in h3 tags. When looking for nodes, "//h3[@class='r']//a" means to look for 'a' nodes (i.e. links) nodes nested anywhere in 'h3' nodes (i.e. level 3 headers) with class 3 anywhere in the document.
moodymudskipper over 4 years

@Therii maybe my answer will help