Added Services_Google support from PEAR to the weblog, a class that is essentially a SOAP wrapper to the Google API. The package is ultimately simple to setup, but the lack of documentation, the use of iterators, and the PHP SOAP extension requirement make this class a little cumbersome to utilize. Still, it gets the job done. Here’s how I use it.

First, I instantiate the Services_Google class and set the Google key, which allows me a maximum of one thousand queries per day:

$g = new Services_Google($key);

Next, I execute the search that I want, where I limit the search to my website:

$g->search("$query site:www.barik.net");

Finally, I utilitize the iterator functionality of PHP 5 on the object:

foreach ($g as $key => $result) {
  if ($result->URL == '') return;
  echo $result->snippet;
  echo $result->title;
}

You get a result for each document that Google returned. You can use print_r on $result to see all the data that each record contains. Finally, the Services_Google class has a bug that causes it loop more times than records. Thus, I do a small hack and forcefully return from the loop when one of the records has an empty URL. That’s really all there is to it.