Monday, March 19, 2007
Screen-scraping Current Google Images
Google has updated their Google Images search result output a while ago. Here's a piece of PHP5 that screen-scrapes the result for your personal use (check Google's robots.txt if in doubt). This sample search engine grabs an array of Google image results using the getGoogleImages() function, and then outputs it again on a blank page; it will allow you to right-click a particular thumbnail to zoom into its full size, just to illustrate how you can use the different result properties:
<?
header("Content-type: text/html; charset=utf-8");
?><!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN" "DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd">
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" xml:lang="en" lang="en">
<head>
<title>Get Images</title>
</head>
<body>
<?
$results = getGoogleImages('horses');
foreach ($results as $result) {
echo '<p><a href="' . htmlentities($result['url']) . '">' .
'<img src="' . htmlentities($result['thumbnail']) . '" alt="" ' .
'oncontextmenu="this.src=\'' . htmlentities($result['image']) . '\';return false;" ' .
'style="border: 1px solid black" /></a><br />' .
'<em>' . htmlentities($result['description']) . '</em>' .
'</p>';
}
?>
</body>
</html><?
function getGoogleImages($q, $doSafeSearch = false)
{
$results = array();
$safe = ($doSafeSearch) ? 'on' : 'off';
$url = 'http://images.google.com/images?safe=' . $safe .
'&q=' . urlencode($q);
$result = file_get_contents($url);
$from = 'dyn.Img("';
$startPos = strPos($result, $from);
$endPos = strPos($result, ');dyn.updateStatus');
$functions = substr( $result, $startPos + strlen($from), $endPos );
$functions = explode('");dyn.Img("', $functions);
foreach ($functions as $f) {
$i = count($results);
list($results[$i]['url'], $v1, $hash,
$results[$i]['image'],
$results[$i]['width'], $results[$i]['height'],
$results[$i]['description'],
$v2, $v3, $more, $extension, $domain) = explode('","', $f);
list($results[$i]['url'], $params) = explode('&h', $results[$i]['url']);
$prefix = 'http://tbn0.google.com/images?q=tbn:';
$results[$i]['thumbnail'] = $prefix . $hash . ':' . $results[$i]['image'];
$results[$i]['description'] = strip_tags($results[$i]['description']);
}
return $results;
}
?>Feel free to run with the code, or see its output on a sample page.
Yahoo offers an actual API for image search. (Note that Yahoo image results contain a high quantity of unrelated adult images, though.)
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