Question

It seems Google’s URLs are structured differently these days. So it is harder to extract the referring keyword from them. Here is an example:

http://www.google.co.uk/search?q=jquery+post+output+46&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&aq=t&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&client=firefox-a#pq=jquery+post+output+46&hl=en&cp=30&gs_id=1v&xhr=t&q=jquery+post+output+php+not+running&pf=p&sclient=psy-ab&client=firefox-a&hs=8N5&rls=org.mozilla:en-US%3Aofficial&source=hp&pbx=1&oq=jquery+post+output+php+not+run&aq=0w&aqi=q-w1&aql=&gs_sm=&gs_upl=&bav=on.2,or.r_gc.r_pw.,cf.osb&fp=bdeb326aa44b07c5&biw=1280&bih=875

The search I performed was actually “jquery post output php not running“, so the first ‘q=’ does not contain the full search. The second one does. I’d like to write a script that always extracts the last ‘q=’, but I’m not sure if Google’s URL’s always have the full search last. Anyone had any experience with this.

Answer 1

You can accomplish this using parse_url(), parse_str(), and urldecode(), where $str is the refer string:

$fragment = parse_url($str, PHP_URL_FRAGMENT);
parse_str($fragment, $arr);

$query = urldecode($arr['q']); // jquery post output php not running