Search engines used by billions of people today provide people with the most relevant results about the content they are looking for. For this, many businesses also strive to be at the top of search results and to be at the forefront of searchers’ results pages. In particular, the power and capabilities of the Google search engine have reached an undeniable level. Businesses scrape Google search results to get search data that will rank them highly. Scraping Google search results is one of the best technologies today to meet the data needs of businesses.
The importance of Google SERP results is increasing day by day for businesses. Accurate analysis and strategies of this data enable businesses to show their product or content to their users in the foreground. In this article, we will prepare a guide on scraping Google SERP results and find answers to many questions about it.
Table of Contents
What are the Use Cases for Scraping Google Search Pages?
There are many use cases that businesses and developers to use Google search page results. The main reason they use these results is data analysis. Businesses and developers analyze this data after obtaining the data from Google search results. According to the results of the analysis, they develop the necessary SEO (Search Engine Optimization) or marketing strategies to prioritize their products or content.
Some popular use cases for Google search results are as follows:
- Business Intelligence and Strategy Development
- Trend Analysis
- Competition Analysis
- Keyword Research
- Monitoring SEO Performance
- The Market Research
What are the Ways to Get Google Search Results?
There are multiple methods of obtaining Google search results nowadays. We will list the most common of these methods under this heading.
Manual Search
This method is the first method that comes to mind to get Google search results. With this method, users get these results manually by going to websites. While this method is simple, it is not suitable for collecting large amounts of data or performing automated operations. Both time and resource costs are quite high.
Google Search API
Google Search API is an official Google Search API. This API gives developers quick access to search results. Google Search API provides its users with 100 free search queries per day. Users who want to use this API professionally in their projects can make up to 10,000 queries per day. The biggest disadvantage of this API is that the daily query limit is not increased. Many users nowadays prefer web scraping APIs for this reason.
Web Scraping APIs
Web scraping APIs specializing in SERP are the most popular way users prefer today. With these APIs, users can scrape Google search results quickly and automatically and get the results. Moreover, they can do this automatically. The usage limits of these APIs are generally flexible and do not have any additional limitations. They can be easily integrated and used in almost every programming language.
What are the Most Popular Google Web Scraping SERP APIs?
In this section, we will list the most preferred SERP APIs in the market today.
Zenserp API
Zenserp API is the most popular web scraping API specialized in SERP in the market. This API is a highly scalable web scraping API. Zenserp always provides sufficient performance to its users, no matter how high the request traffic is. It quickly provides SERP results for areas such as Google Images, Google Videos, Google Maps, and Google Trends. Moreover, it supports other popular search engines such as Yandex, Bing, and DuckDuckGo. Lastly, it also offers a location-based web scraping experience to its users.
Take a closer look at the reverse image search, a unique service powered by the Zenserp API.
SerpApi
SerpApi is another popular web scraping API that supports almost every product from Google. National companies such as IBM, Nvidia, Airbnb, and Shopify use this API. This API supports Google’s Search, Images Play Store, Academic, Lens, Finance, and more. It is a very easy-to-use API. It can be easily integrated into all programming languages. This API provides its users with a response in JSON format with detailed results. SerpApi offers users a free playground on its homepage. With this playground, users can do tests for free.
Bright Data
Bright Data SERP API is one of the most popular SERP APIs on the market today. It offers SERP data from multiple search engines. This API provides SERP results from Google, Bing, DuckDuckGo, Yandex, Baidu, Yahoo, and Naver. Additionally, this API provides powerful support to its users with 24/7 global support service.
Scraping Google Search Results in PHP by Using the Zenserp API
We will integrate Zenserp API into the PHP programming language in this section. With this integration, we will obtain the SERP results of the Google search engine.
Before we start developing the application, let’s register for one of the flexible subscription plans that Zenserp offers us. After registration, we will get an API key.
Once we have our API key, we can start developing our application. For this, let’s create a PHP project for the file path we intend to develop an application. Then paste the code below into this project.
$ch = curl_init();
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, true);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_HEADER, false);
$data = [
"q" => "Pied Piper",
"location" => "New York,New York,United States",
];
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, "https://app.zenserp.com/api/v2/search?" . http_build_query($data));
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_HTTPHEADER, array(
"Content-Type: application/json",
"apikey: YOUR-API-KEY",
));
$response = curl_exec($ch);
curl_close($ch);
$json = json_decode($response);
var_dump($json);With this code snippet, we will send a request to the Zenserp API and get search results in New York, New York, USA for the keyword “Pied Piper”. Before starting the application, let’s paste our API key obtained after registration in the ‘YOUR-API-KEY’ field.
Some of the JSON response we get after running the application is as follows.
Conclusion
To sum up, there are many ways to get SERP data for the Google search engine. Google SERP data provides businesses with incredibly valuable information on growth, development, and targeting. Businesses need to choose the most appropriate way according to their needs and requirements to obtain this data.
FAQs
Q: What are the Ways to Extract Data from Google Pages?
A: There are many ways to extract data from Google pages. The first of these ways is to use Google’s services. Google Custom Search JSON API is one of them. The second way is using a web scraping API. Lastly, another way is to manually develop and use a web scraping application.
Q: Can I Scrape Google Maps Results with the Zenserp API?
A: Yes, you can. Zenserp API can scrape the search results of Google Search, Google Images, Google Videos, Google News, Google Shopping, and Google Trends quickly and uninterruptedly.
Q: What are Some Popular Use Cases of Google SERP results?
A: Businesses and developers use Google SERP results for multiple purposes. Some popular use cases where they use these results are as follows:
- Keyword Research
- Competition Analysis
- SEO Performance Monitoring
Q: Which Search Engines Does the Zenserp API Provide SERP Data for?
A: Although the Zenserp API is known for scraping Google’s SERP data, it actually provides SERP data from multiple search engines. These are Yandex, Bing, and DuckDuckGo. Zenserp API also provides SERP data from YouTube.
What APIs Can I Use to Scrape Google SERP Data?
There are many web scraping APIs on the internet that you can use to scrape Google SERP data. Some of these APIs are as follows:
- Zenserp API
- SerpApi
- Bright Data SERP API
- Scale SERP API
- Serpdog API
Q: How do Scrape Google Search Results Using a SERP API?
A: The steps to follow when scraping Google SERP data with a SERP API are as follows:
- Find a SERP API
- Register and obtain the API key
- Choose your target website
- Scrape and store the scraped data
