google suggest scraper (php & simplexml)

Today’s goal is a basic php Google Suggest scraper because I wanted traffic data and keywords for free.

Before we start :

google scraping is bad !

Good People use the Google Adwords API : 25 cents for 1000 units, 15++ units for keyword suggestion so they pay 4 or 5 dollar for 1000 keyword suggestions (if they can find a good programmer which also costs a few dollars). Or they opt for SemRush (also my preference), KeywordSpy, Spyfu, and other services like 7Search PPC programs to get keyword and traffic data and data on their competitors but these also charge about 80 dollars per month for a limited account up to a few hundred per month for seo companies. Good people pay plenty.

We tiny grey webmice of marketing however just want a few estimates, at low or better no cost : like this :

Suggestion autocomplete is AJAX, it outputs XML :

< ?xml version="1.0"? >
   <toplevel>
     <CompleteSuggestion>
       <suggestion data="senior quotes"/>
       <num_queries int="30000000"/>
     </CompleteSuggestion>
     <CompleteSuggestion>
       <suggestion data="senior skip day lyrics"/>
       <num_queries int="441000"/>
     </CompleteSuggestion>
   </toplevel>

Using SimpleXML, the PHP routine is as simple as querying g00gle.c0m/complete/search?, grabbing the autocomplete xml, and extracting the attribute data :

 
        if ($_SERVER['QUERY_STRING']=='') die('enter a query like http://host/filename.php?query');
	$contentstring = @file_get_contents("http://g00gle.c0m/complete/search?output=toolbar&q=".urlencode($kw));  
  	$content = simplexml_load_string($contentstring );

        foreach($content->CompleteSuggestion as $c) {
            $term = (string) $c->suggestion->attributes()->data;
            //note : traffic data is sometimes missing   
            $traffic = (string) $c->num_queries->attributes()->int;
            echo $term. " ".$traffic . "
" ;
	}

I made a quick php script that outputs the terms as a list of new queries so you can walk through the suggestions :

The source is as text file up for download overhere (rename it to suggestit.php and it should run on any server with php5.* and simplexml).