How can I access the first link of google's search bar through matlab?

So lets say I want to search for Mathworks on google via matlab, a code that could do this could be like this

search_target = 'mathworks';
url = ['www.google.com/search?q=' search_target];
%url = ['www.google.com/search?btnI=1&q=' search_target];
web(url,'-browser')

Now my question is how can I access the first link the code generated or to clarify what can I add to the code so it can automatically access the first link from the generated search query?

[Geoff Hayes]

Ahd - you meay need to use webread to make your request to get the search/query results, and then parse the HTML response to get the first search list result. I'm not sure how you can programmatically query for the top result and/or then navigate to it automatically.

[Ahd Mukbil]

Geoff can you clarify how the code could differ if webread and parsing of the HTML was included?

[Geoff Hayes]

Ahd - take a look at the link I've included in my comment. The code would look something like

search_target = 'mathworks';
url = ['www.google.com/search?q=' search_target];
code = webread(url);
tree = htmlTree(code);

and then you would need to "traverse" the tree to (presumably) find the first link, extract it and then navigate to it using web. I haven't tried to do this (my version of MATLAB is too old) but I think it is doable.

[Ahd Mukbil]

Thanks Geoff

Answer 1

[Rafael S.T. Vieira]

Hi, Mukbil,

Using webread only, we would have an html-document, and have to use regexp to find whatever we want:

url=['https://www.google.com/search'];
html = webread(url, 'q', 'mathworks');
tokens = regexp(html , 'href="/url\?q=(?<links>[^ >]+)/', 'names');
first=tokens(1).links;
disp(first)

As you can imagine, Google is not very fond of people doing this. We could skip accessing their site (and ads), so the previous code with regexp may work today, but may not work tomorrow.

A better solution is to use REST for accessing the Google API. They will give you a unique key that you can employ at your application and a link that will return a JSON file with the results.

And as it was said already, another good option is to use the Text Analytics toolbox, which has an HTML parser. It will make it easier to find whatever we are looking in an HTML file.

[Ahd Mukbil]

it worked thank you and yes I understand you.

Answer 2

[Misa Taguchi]

Hi. With Google API

key = 'Your_API_Key';
searchengineid = 'Your_Search_Engine_ID';
url = 'https://customsearch.googleapis.com/customsearch/v1';
searchquery = 'Your_Search_Query';
results = webread(url,'q',searchquery,'cx',searchengineid,'key',key);

and see this for more information about the API key and the search engine ID.

After searching, the links are stored in

results.items.link