Question

I was wondering if it is possible to query a search engine via matlab. I would like to get the amount of hits for a certain query via matlab.

Answer 1

Try

S = urlread('https://www.google.com/search?q=test');

This will return the HTML spat out by Google when querying it with the keyword “test”. You can then do something like

% search engine specific filter for no. of results
results = regexpi(S, 'About [0-9_\,]* results', 'match'); 

% parse further or error out
if ~isempty(results)    
    results = textscan(results{1}, '%s'); % tokenize string
    results = str2double(results{2}); % number of results
else
    error('Something went wrong during the query.');
end

Note that urlread requires Java running, so obviously you can’t do it when running with the -nojvm startup option (my first attempt 🙂