PHP Tip: Add Custom Google Search Results to Your Site with PHP

Friday, January 16th, 2009

Have you ever wanted to integrate a custom google search on your site, and style it to your liking? Today, one of our new Dev-Tips author Brian Cray will take you through adding custom google search results to your site with php.

What you need

Quickly...

  • Mike Migurski's PHP JSON decoder
  • allow_url_fopen set to On in your PHP.INI (many hosts have this on by default)
  • A desire to learn to be even more awesome than you already are

You'll end up with 2 files to make things work: search.php that shows a search form and results and querygoogle.php that pulls search results from Google. Put the CSS used in this tutorial wherever you want... if you want it.

How will this make your life better?

Being the awesome Web developer/designer/jack-of-all-tradeser you are and your clients know you are, you receive frequent requests to add a "little search box" as a part of your client's Web site. What follows is a twitch you disguise as a sneeze because you know you haven't got a solid easy-to-impliment custom solution that the client won't groan at.

But that'll all change now. Armed with a little PHP wizardry, we can turn you into a star. This is a ridiculously easy to implement solution for adding CSS-able custom results straight from Google to your client's Web site. And, we'll do it all in 3+1 easy steps. (note: please read Google's Terms of Use).

Step 1: The search form/page - search.php

Since computers can't yet read minds, we'll have to create a simple search form that includes a text field for the search query and a search button. This should be pretty ho-hum to you, but it's important nonetheless.

Notice the form posts to querygoogle.php. We'll create that script in step 2.

<form method="post" action="querygoogle.php">
<label for="searchquery"><span class="caption">Search this site</span> <input type="text" size="20" maxlength="255" title="Enter your keywords and click the search button" name="searchquery" /></label> <input type="submit" value="Search" />
</form>

Yeah baby! We've created a simple search form ready for any daunting search challenge. Let's create the real muscle be your custom search engine, the famed querygoogle.php.

Step 2: The script to query Google - querygoogle.php

Now the fun stuff you've been skip scrolling to see (I know your scanning tendancies!). I wrote this PHP script to take advantage of Google's AJAX Search API to provide a transparent, usable, branded experience to end-users. My customers were happy, and yours will be too. Save this PHP as querygoogle.php.

Here's what the code is doing:

  1. Includes the JSON library
  2. Sets up the URL that you will give you Google's search results. The URL includes your domain to make it a site specific search and the user's search query. The search uses Google's "site:domain.com keywords" search syntax
  3. Uses fopen and fread to grab the JSON that results from a call to Google
  4. Decodes the JSON into a PHP object with Mike's JSON library
  5. Iterates through the object, creating custom HTML-formatted results
  6. Sets a session variable that contains the custom HTML-formatted results to send to your custom results page
  7. Uses PHP's header function to send the browser to your custom results page
<?php
session_start();

// if you use an Mike Migurski's JSON library, include it like I did
require_once('JSON.phps');

// Here's the Google AJAX Search API url for curl. It uses Google Search's site:www.yourdomain.com syntax to search in a specific site. I used $_SERVER['HTTP_HOST'] to find my domain automatically. Change $_POST['searchquery'] to your posted search query

$url = 'http://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/services/search/web?rsz=large&v=1.0&q=' . urlencode('site:' . $_SERVER['HTTP_HOST'] . ' ' . $_POST['searchquery']);

// use fopen and fread to pull Google's search results

$handle = fopen($url, 'rb');
$body = '';
while (!feof($handle)) {
$body .= fread($handle, 8192);
}
fclose($handle);

// now $body is the JSON encoded results. We need to decode them.

$json = new Services_JSON();
$json = $json->decode($body);

// now $json is an object of Google's search results and we need to iterate through it.

foreach($json->responseData->results as $searchresult)
{
if($searchresult->GsearchResultClass == 'GwebSearch')
{
$formattedresults .= '
<div class="searchresult">
<h3><a href="' . $searchresult->unescapedUrl . '">' . $searchresult->titleNoFormatting . '</a></h3>
<p class="resultdesc">' . $searchresult->content . '</p>
<p class="resulturl">' . $searchresult->visibleUrl . '</p>
</div>';
}
}

$_SESSION['googleresults'] = $formattedresults;
header('Location: ' . $_SERVER['HTTP_REFERER']);
exit;
?>

Important Note

We are having a small issue with the code syntax formatting, be sure the '&' signs in the url on line 9 above do *not* have a semicolon after them. Please see 'Renes' comment below for more. Apologies for the inconvenience!

Step 3: The results page - back to search.php

I know you're itching to see the results. So was I! Boy I wish I could do it all over again for the first time...

Anyway, the HTML formatted results are now stored in a PHP session variable from querygoogle.php. Groovy. All we have to do is display them and add some more CSS to make the results look sexy.

Make sure you can pull the results from the session by verifying that you are starting the session at the beginning of search.php and then echo the results. See below for the final search.php code (we started it in Step 1):

&lt;?php
session_start();
?&gt;

<form method="post" action="querygoogle.php">
<label for="searchquery"><span class="caption">Search this site</span> <input type="text" size="20" maxlength="255" title="Enter your keywords and click the search button" name="searchquery" /></label> <input type="submit" value="Search" />
</form>

&lt;?php
if(!empty($_SESSION['googleresults']))
{
echo $_SESSION['googleresults'];
unset($_SESSION['googleresults']);
}
?&gt;

Your search results work! But they're ugly. Here's some sexy CSS like I promised to get your started.

body
{
background-color: #000;
color: #ccc;
font: .75em/1.5em Arial, sans-serif; /* EMs calculated with pxtoem.com */
padding: 1.5em;
margin: 0;
width: 40em;
}

.searchresult
{
padding: 1.5em 0;
border-bottom: 1px solid #333;
}

.searchresult h3, .searchresult p
{
margin: 0;
}

.searchresult h3 a
{
font: italic 1em Georgia, serif;
color: #f30;
border-bottom: 1px solid #900;
text-decoration: none;
font-weight: bold;
font-size: 1em;
}

.searchresult .resultdesc b
{
color: #fff;
}

.searchresult .resulturl
{
color: #666;
font-size: .75em;
}

If you'd like to style your own results your way, each result will be placed in the following HTML format:

<div class="searchresult">
<h3><a href="page-url">Page Title</a></h3>
<p class="resultdesc">Page description/highlights</p>
<p class="resulturl">URL that google always shows in green</p>
</div>

Step 3+1: Celebrate!

Congratulations! Your clients are happy. You've worked hard and you should take some "you time."

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ABOUT THIS AUTHOR


Brian Cray
Brian Cray is a marketing & Internet strategy consultant, web developer, and Apple fanatic living in Columbus, Ohio, USA. His work has been featured by Mashable, NETTUTS, Smashing Magazine, and many others. He's happy to share his knowledge with you on DevTips and his own blog at Brian Cray.com.
  1. Dean
    January 17, 2009 at 9:33 am
    Reply

    Good stuff – I would revisit line 19 in the Step 2 code listing if I was you, however.

    • sm
      September 27, 2009 at 8:56 pm
      Reply

      nice..thnx

  2. Brian Cray
    January 18, 2009 at 11:32 am
    Reply

    Good call Dean! Problem resolved! Thanks so much for your feedback!

    • Felix
      October 22, 2009 at 4:55 am
      Reply

      Am getting this service error

      Fatal error: Class ‘Services_JSON’ not found in D:\xampp\htdocs\harusi\querygoogle.php on line 22

  3. Alif Rachmawadi
    January 29, 2009 at 3:58 pm
    Reply

    Great post Brian! finally I can stop using obsolete Google search SOAP. Thanks.

  4. Jonn L.
    March 2, 2009 at 8:13 am
    Reply

    Great detailed steps Brian.

    If I have a secure site that requires user login and I do not want to make the site content public at all, can I still use Google search ? i.e. only users that login can search and the search results nor site content are publicly available. Only to logged in users.

  5. Brian Cray
    March 2, 2009 at 8:16 am
    Reply

    @John L.,

    Thanks John. I’m sad to say that unfortunately this only works if Google is indexing your pages.

  6. Tegan Snyder
    March 2, 2009 at 9:05 am
    Reply

    I can’t seem to get it to work. I get a warning…

    “Warning: Invalid argument supplied for foreach() in /home/irishtit/public_html/09/querygoogle.php on line 29″

    If I echo the $body variable in querygoogle.php it says:
    {“responseData”: null, “responseDetails”: “invalid version”, “responseStatus”: 400}

  7. Brian Cray
    March 2, 2009 at 9:07 am
    Reply

    Did you try it more than once? Did you verify the domain name that you are searching and that it has results in Google?

    • Tegan Snyder
      March 2, 2009 at 9:53 am
      Reply

      Hey Brain,

      I tried it again and it doesn’t work.
      Here is my site

      Use the search box and you can see the results yourself.

      Thanks,
      Tegan

    • Rene
      March 2, 2009 at 12:07 pm
      Reply

      Hi Brian,

      I got the same warning as Tegan. I tried it both in PHP 4 and PHP 5 enviroment.

      allow_url_fopen is set to On in PHP.INI

      Google site:domain.com queary works.

      Any suggestions?

    • Rene
      March 2, 2009 at 12:30 pm
      Reply

      Found a solution: You got to remove all these amp; Tags from $url at line 9 ! Just use the “&” instead.

      This works:

      $url = 'http://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/services/search/web?rsz=large&v=1.0&q=' . urlencode('site:' . $_SERVER['HTTP_HOST'] . ' ' . $_POST['searchquery']);

      • Drew
        March 2, 2009 at 2:18 pm

        Thank you Rene, we are having a slight issue with the code formatting but I have edited it and made a note below the code to inform everyone. Thanks!

      • Tegan Snyder
        March 5, 2009 at 10:42 am

        Thank you very much Rene. I appreciate it very much!

  8. Teresa
    March 2, 2009 at 11:08 am
    Reply

    Thank you for writing this tutorial. I recently implemented Google’s CSBE for a client and it was a big hassle. Your method seems a lot more straightforward, however a couple of things aren’t clear to me, perhaps because I am a PHP noob, and I apparently haven’t put this together right.

    If you would post a link to one of the sites you’ve done that includes this script it would be most helpful.

  9. Brian Cray
    March 2, 2009 at 12:09 pm
    Reply

    WIll take a look at it… perhaps Google changed something… look for update soon!

    • Tegan Snyder
      March 2, 2009 at 1:15 pm
      Reply

      Thanks Brain! I will look forward to your update.

  10. Marc
    March 2, 2009 at 12:57 pm
    Reply

    Any thoughts on pagination?

    • Rene
      March 2, 2009 at 1:07 pm
      Reply

      BTW, for all who need their country-specific characters to be displayed (ISO 8859-1), just replace

      $_SESSION['googleresults'] = $formattedresults;

      with

      $_SESSION['googleresults'] = utf8_decode($formattedresults);

  11. Teresa
    March 2, 2009 at 1:51 pm
    Reply

    I removed all the extraneous ampersands – thanks for the tip, Rene.

    I’m finding it confusing that the first step is labeled search.php but seems to contain the form code, which doesn’t seem like it should be in the search.php script. Then after the discussion about the querygoogle script we go back to search.php and insert session_start();, etc., before the form code and echo $_SESSION['googleresults'];, etc. after the form code???

    I think it would be helpful if someone were to just post what working code should look like in the search.php file.

  12. oneroux
    March 3, 2009 at 4:35 pm
    Reply

    pagination?

  13. Tegan Snyder
    March 4, 2009 at 10:40 am
    Reply

    Has anybody got this to work yet? Can somebody package this up in a zip? I’m still getting errors… shucks

  14. David Dashifen Kees
    March 4, 2009 at 1:01 pm
    Reply

    If you’re using PHP5, you may not need the JSON class. PHP5 includes two functions, json_encode() and json_decode() that might be able to do the trick for you without the include. Just be aware of the second parameter to json_decode(); if that paramter is true, the function returns a PHP array but if it’s false you get a stdClass object, if I remember correctly. Usually, I’m shooting for an array.

  15. Brian Cray
    March 4, 2009 at 1:14 pm
    Reply

    @David true… I wanted to make this function work for people running PHP 4, too. Your solution is definitely worth looking into if PHP is installed.

  16. Kelly Cook
    March 4, 2009 at 1:33 pm
    Reply

    I had a few of the same problems as listed above. One thing I noticed is that if you right click the link for the JSON decoder and select “save as”, the contents of the file is not the same as if you were to click the link to view the file in your browser and copy/paste the contents of JSON.phps to a new file (or save that page).

    Fortunately, this solved my problems. I agree that it would be nice to have a link to the complete source files. Thanks for this great tutorial!!

  17. insub2
    March 4, 2009 at 5:17 pm
    Reply

    Thank’s for this tutorial.

    Why is there only 4 results?

    • insub2
      March 4, 2009 at 5:31 pm
      Reply

      …never mind. I was using this tutorial in conjuction with the google documentation [http://code.google.com/apis/ajaxsearch/documentation/#fonje_snippets_php] (because I’m using PHP5 and don’t want to bother with that JSON decoder library) and didn’t use the correct url.

      But since i’m on the subject, do you know how we get to the rest of the results…pagination?

  18. John Ritterbush
    March 22, 2009 at 12:27 pm
    Reply

    This has been a huge help, thanks!

    Maybe this is a n00b question, but why do you need to use the unset(). What is the worst-case scenario for non-critical data. The problem I see with unset() for this case is that it breaks the back button for anyone doing a search on your site. If you unset it there, when they click a result and then click back in their browser they come back to a blank page. When they do a new search it will overwrite the old session data, so the only bad I see is a session file temporarily on the server that is bigger than 0kb. The Google Search API limits to such a small result set that even with the maximum 32 results, the session file will never be that big, and is only temporary, right?

    As an aside, when I used this code, I moved the form to a header include file for my site, that way the search form is at the top of all of the pages. Then the search.php page is just a results page. So the form sends the ’searchquery’ text post to the querygoogle.php but on the querygoogle.php file I changed the Location redirect to the search.php (rather than back to the HTTP_REFERER which for me could be any page on the site).

    Thanks again for writing this up. I am brand new to the search api, and know next-to-nothing about sessions so the fact that I got it even working at all is a testament to a good tutorial.

  19. ozan
    March 24, 2009 at 12:35 pm
    Reply

    nice work, but didn’t work on me.

    i did exactly how you explained. but when i try to search smt it tries to open the codes.

    you must test it urself:

    http://www.genstr.com/test/

  20. Kashif
    April 6, 2009 at 6:52 am
    Reply

    Nice tutorial. However, I was wondering what are the benefits of this script over Google’s Custom Search Engine?

  21. dspinoz
    April 24, 2009 at 7:03 pm
    Reply

    awesome! gave some great ideas for incorporating google into my website

  22. Miros
    April 30, 2009 at 11:29 am
    Reply

    Hi. Very long time I´m looking for some customize of google for google results. What I meen is: When you look for some word in google, and google returned the results, they are 1 row for the title, 2 row for the text, and 1 row for the link. I want to change the 2 rows for the text, and make them 6,7 or 8 rows. It´s possible?

  23. mc
    May 2, 2009 at 11:26 pm
    Reply

    This is great, but I am wondering if its ok with google terms of service. I would like to take results from google movie search and put on my site, showtimes and theaters etc. If i grab the data and parse it into my site, does anyone know if its allowed?

  24. internet marketing
    May 3, 2009 at 1:31 pm
    Reply

    cool update mann

    ill enjoy it.

  25. mc
    May 3, 2009 at 11:58 pm
    Reply

    Use of the Services by you

    5.3 You agree not to access (or attempt to access) any of the Services by any means other than through the interface that is provided by Google, unless you have been specifically allowed to do so in a separate agreement with Google. You specifically agree not to access (or attempt to access) any of the Services through any automated means (including use of scripts or web crawlers) and shall ensure that you comply with the instructions set out in any robots.txt file present on the Services.

    5.5 Unless you have been specifically permitted to do so in a separate agreement with Google, you agree that you will not reproduce, duplicate, copy, sell, trade or resell the Services for any purpose.
    ——-

    So we are not allowed to access the info other than through the interface and also not allowed to reproduce (display) the info once we have accessed it.

    Thats not good.
    I’ve seen sites/apps accessing and reproducing google info, so I guess they don’t enforce strictly?

  26. Haris
    May 13, 2009 at 4:44 am
    Reply

    Hi..
    Can you please tell me that, still this functionality providing by google as free. I would like to use it for my webste…

  27. Al
    June 4, 2009 at 2:27 pm
    Reply

    So, I cant get this to work.
    I created both pages and when I search a keyword, it goes to querygoogle.php, then the pages goes blank. It does not return me to the search.php page. Nor does it display any kind of search results. :-(

    Any ideas?

    • Al
      June 4, 2009 at 2:58 pm
      Reply

      So I got it to work, there were some issues in the JSON.phps.
      Anyway, it works, all but 2 important things seem to be missing.
      1- It only displays 8 results.
      2- There is no pagination.

      Anyone have any tips for these 2 issues?

  28. Umar
    June 7, 2009 at 6:53 am
    Reply

    I am also facing the same problem:
    1. only 8 results are there
    2. How to get the next results. I want to have at least 20 to 50 results. This can be in two iterations but I need to get at least 20 results.

    Please help ASAP.

  29. vaunce
    June 16, 2009 at 8:46 am
    Reply

    This is a great pics of work. I may use it on my site. Love it. Thank you.

  30. dorjay
    July 19, 2009 at 4:17 pm
    Reply

    i m behind proxy so i use curl to read the url and feed the output to json_decode it gives me Invalid argument “foreach()”::
    Can u exapin why??

    $json = json_decode($body);

    foreach($json->responseData->results as $searchresult)
    //Warning: Invalid argument supplied for foreach()

  31. rajat
    September 1, 2009 at 12:35 am
    Reply

    I am also facing the same problem as discussed above but didn’t get the solution.

    Invalid argument supplied for foreach()

    foreach($json->responseData->results as $searchresult)
    when I check it from myself responseData and result were absent in the JSON.phps.

    Can I use google custom search in my local machine.

    Please help I am really needy at this time.

    thanks
    Rajat Singh

  32. rajat
    September 1, 2009 at 2:12 am
    Reply

    This is the main problem when I tried to print json object I got this type of information which shows the version is invalid
    response 400.
    [responseData] =>
    [responseDetails] => invalid version
    [responseStatus] => 400

    Please help me to find the suitable solution.

    thanks
    Rajat Singh

  33. vikas
    September 1, 2009 at 6:37 am
    Reply

    is it possible to integrate the above functionality on locahost

    pls help me

  34. jake
    September 2, 2009 at 11:28 am
    Reply

    I’m new to php and can’t get this to work. It says:

    decode($body); // now $json is an object of Google’s search results and we need to iterate through it. foreach($json->responseData->results as $searchresult) { if($searchresult->GsearchResultClass == ‘GwebSearch’) { $formattedresults .= ‘
    ‘ . $searchresult->titleNoFormatting . ‘

    ‘ . $searchresult->content . ‘

    ‘ . $searchresult->visibleUrl . ‘
    ‘; } } $_SESSION['googleresults'] = $formattedresults; header(‘Location: ../results.html’ . $_SERVER['HTTP_REFERER']); exit; ?>

    any ideas?

    thanks,
    jake

  35. margoha
    September 6, 2009 at 11:08 pm
    Reply

    Мы подготовили современный журнал про новый сериал маргоша. Только здесь можно скачать онлайн молодежный сериал маргоша. Представляем Вам актуальные новости про сериал маргоша. Для Вас красочные фотографии из сериала маргоша.

  36. kapil
    September 9, 2009 at 6:37 am
    Reply

    Hi i tried this code but i am not getting any response data in that session array can you please tell me is it related to some apache settings,i checked my allow_url_fopen it is on too.

  37. No_limits48
    October 10, 2009 at 11:16 am
    Reply

    I live is connected to the city by local trains. ,

  38. Denis
    October 11, 2009 at 11:46 am
    Reply

    U can use simple pagination by returning results via ajax api.

    just add the starting point of the search result in the link.

    example :
    $url = ‘http://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/services/search/web?rsz=large&v=1.0&start=8&q=’denis’;

    with start=8 we get results for the page 2, with start=16 page 3 and so on until start=56, because ajax api returns max 64 results.

    This is only for 8 result per page. If u have less do the math yourself.

  39. praveen
    October 18, 2009 at 7:28 am
    Reply

    Great post,

    but would like to emphasize that in querygoogle.php at line9: “$_SERVER['HTTP_HOST']” .It shoul be $_SERVER['HTTP_POST']

    • Amin
      February 27, 2010 at 11:04 am
      Reply

      Thanks a lot, It really helped me to solve the program problem.

  40. SEO Company UK
    October 21, 2009 at 10:44 am
    Reply

    Is there a way to customize this script t. search Google.co.uk (pages from uk)

  41. Felix
    October 22, 2009 at 4:57 am
    Reply

    Am getting this error.
    Fatal error: Class ‘Services_JSON’ not found in D:\xampp\htdocs\harusi\querygoogle.php on line 21

  42. supremasi
    October 30, 2009 at 11:41 pm
    Reply

    i think in the example above only applies to web search,
    how to search for other types such as VideoSearch, Blogsearch, NewsSearch, ImageSearch, BookSearch, PatentSearch?

  43. sandy
    November 9, 2009 at 9:34 am
    Reply

    Can this script be used to search web instead of only one site. How does the code change with that. Is it possible to put in a hidden query also?

  44. adi
    December 15, 2009 at 5:05 pm
    Reply

    nice infos…thanks.

  45. Kerala Information
    December 29, 2009 at 11:37 pm
    Reply

    Nice Post.. it was helped lot..
    thanks
    Brain

  46. Goran
    January 5, 2010 at 7:19 pm
    Reply

    Hi,

    can anyone please specify why do I always get after submiting a PHP code of the querygoogle.php file ?

    I will be very thankfull for any response

  47. bp
    March 4, 2010 at 8:26 am
    Reply

    My search results in only one result. How do I set the expand_mode_open to turn on.

    Please help.

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