Playing with XML-Package: Get No. of Google Search Hits with R

GoogleHits <- function(input)
   {
    require(XML)
    require(stringr)
    require(RCurl)
    url <- paste("https://www.google.com/search?q=\"",
                 input, "\"", sep = "")

    CAINFO = paste(system.file(package="RCurl"), "/CurlSSL/ca-bundle.crt", sep = "")
    script <- getURL(url, followlocation = TRUE, cainfo = CAINFO)
    doc <- htmlParse(script)
    res <- xpathSApply(doc, "//div[@id='subform_ctrl']/*", xmlValue)[[2]]
    cat(paste("\nYour Search URL:\n", url, "\n", sep = ""))
    cat("\nNo. of Hits:\n")
    return(as.integer(gsub("[^0-9]", "", res)))
   }

# Example:
GoogleHits("R%Statistical%Software")

lapply(list_of_search_terms, GoogleHits)

Tags: R, web scraping, XML package