Fredrik Lundh has a stupid googlesuggest hack, which I've tweaked to be a simple command-line program:

guin:tmp$ googlesuggest python
python             (10,600,000 results)
python tutorial    (2,630,000 results)
pythons            (460,000 results)
python 2.2         (1,840,000 results)
python programming (4,380,000 results)
[...]

Simply save this code out to a file and run it, giving the search strings you want on the command-line.

#!/usr/bin/env python

import sys, string
import urllib

URI = "http://www.google.com/complete/search?hl=en&js=true&qu="

def suggest(term):
    # get the javascript dataset
    text = urllib.urlopen(URI + urllib.quote(term)).read()
    # pretend it's python
    text = text.replace("new Array", "new_Array").rstrip().rstrip(";")
    # simulate the "google suggest" javascript environment
    dict = {}
    dict["frameElement"] = None
    dict["new_Array"] = dict["sendRPCDone"] = lambda *x: x
    # and run it
    return zip(*eval(text, dict)[2:4])

res = suggest(string.join(sys.argv[1:], ' '))
if not res: sys.exit(0)
collen = max(map(lambda x: len(x[0]), res))
for term, count in res:
   print '%-*s (%s)' % ( collen, term, count )

Google is extremely cool. If you have seen Google Suggest, what are you waiting for?

comments powered by Disqus