Updated Again: Parse Google Search Results for First URL

This is pretty much a regurgitation of my post from back in February of 2011. Google slightly changed how they build their search results pages again sometime between then and now, and I had a new Insiders subscriber sign-up looking for that very solution. When I checked to see if the file still worked, it did not, so I made a few tweaks to get it running again.

Here's a copy-paste of the last post on this topic:

Those of you who've been following me for some time may know that I've done quite a few projects related to parsing Google search results for various data -- URLs, number of results, etc. Those of you using the code likely know that some time ago Google apparently made some changes to how they put together their site causing my stuff to stop working. Well, recently one of the requesters of one of these projects - one that returns the first non-paid URL returned - came back and had me update it to work with how Google's site currently displays search results.


This time I made it into a user-defined function. You simply enter the function...


=getFirstGoogleResultURL(A2), where the value of cell A2 is the search term.


It works pretty slick, but know that Google will not allow this sort of thing to be used on large volumes of searches. I'm pretty sure they'd much rather have you using their APIs for this sort of usage.

Excel_Geek Insiders subscribers, your copy of this file is on its way.

Later,

Excel_Geek