Search Engine Results Counter
April 22, 2013Here’s a neat little script I’ve been working on. This script will count the number of results available from the respective Search Engine for each search term you submit.
Why Is This Important?
The idea is that the search engines (Google and Bing) will scrape the Internet for all sorts of information, but they will index and serve the most relevant results in their databases. One can then assume that more results for a query means that the search engine deems the query popular/important/frequently-searched-for/etc.
How Does This Apply To Me?
Let’s say you own a real brick and mortar store. You’ve been in business for some time and you’re ready to go online and use paid advertising. You carry a number of products, but can’t afford to advertise them all. So you take your best-selling product, Widget X, and use keywords and phrases for Widget X. Simple, right? But what sells well in a brick and mortar, may not sell as well online. You can research product popularity with this script to see how it stacks up against the rest of your inventory!
Perhaps you’re a student who’s conducting a report on celebrities and their popularity online? You can superficially determine the popularity of a person by comparing the number of results returned compared with the number of results for another person! Which New York Times Best-Seller is being talked about the most? Searching for a popular gift? This script is a great start to helping you find those answers.
How Does It Work?
Basically the script submits the query to the search engines, then captures the number of results as a value. The next query is submitted, and that value is captured, and so on. Then the results are sorted by queries with the most results first. In this script, the higher number of results, the better.
Great, How Do I Use This?
Simple, you type in the search queries that you want to compare, and click submit! That’s it. Oh, there’s one other thing:
In an effort to limit server resources and to minimize abuse, you’ll be able to conduct 3 requests before being asked to stop for 10 minutes. You can resume after this 10 minute resting-period.
Tip: You can use most standard search operators to filter out unwanted results. You can take a peek at the quality of the results by clicking the external link icon for each query for the respective search engine.