Web Scraping Google URLs

UPDATE: This function has now been improved, see googleSearchXScraper()

Google slightly changed the html code it uses for hyperlinks on search pages last Thursday, thus causing one of my scripts to stop working. Thankfully, this is easily solved in R thanks to the XML package and the power and simplicity of XPath expressions:

# load packages
library(RCurl)
library(XML)

get_google_page_urls <- function(u) {
  # read in page contents
  html <- getURL(u)

  # parse HTML into tree structure
  doc <- htmlParse(html)

  # extract url nodes using XPath. Originally I had used "//a[@href][@class='l']" until the google code change.
  links <- xpathApply(doc, "//h3//a[@href]", function(x) xmlAttrs(x)[[1]])

  # free doc from memory
  free(doc)

  # ensure urls start with "http" to avoid google references to the search page
  links <- grep("http://", links, fixed = TRUE, value=TRUE)
  return(links)
}

u <- "http://www.google.co.uk/search?aq=f&gcx=w&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8&q=r+project"
get_google_page_urls(u)

# [1] "http://www.r-project.org/"
# [2] "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R_(programming_language)"
# [3] "http://www.rseek.org/"
# [4] "http://www.gutenberg.org/browse/authors/r"
# [5] "http://sciviews.org/_rgui/"
# [6] "http://www.itc.nl/~rossiter/teach/R/RIntro_ITC.pdf"
# [7] "http://stat.ethz.ch/CRAN/"
# [8] "http://hughesbennett.co.uk/RProject"
# [9] "http://www.warwick.ac.uk/statsdept/user-2011/"

Lovely jubbly! 🙂

P.S. I know that there is an API of some sort for google search but I don’t think anyone has made an R package for it. Yet. (I feel my skill set is insufficient to do it myself!