Perform a web search through Matlab and get back the results

Hello,

I would like to perform a search in a website (every time searching different terms) and get results in matlab platform.

Do you know any easy and reliable method to perform this?

Thanks in advance.

LK

Answer 1

[DGM]

There are probably better ways, but here's one example I pulled from something else I wrote.

This relies on Google's JSON API. You'll need to read about how to set that up.

apikey = '12345'; % your API key
cx = '12345'; % your search engine ID
query = 'delicious spiders'; % the search query

wopt = weboptions('contenttype','json');
url = ['https://customsearch.googleapis.com/customsearch/v1?cx=' cx '&key=' apikey '&q=' query '&num=10'];

try 
    S = webread(url,wopt);
catch
    % this might also happen if no exact url exist and API call is broken somehow
    fprintf('Connection error.  Web search failed.\n')
    return;
end

Your results will be in the struct S.

Considering that getting relevant results from search engines is often difficult to impossible, I would posit that there is no such thing as a reliable option, regardless of how consistently they might execute without overt error.