I'm feeling like this is an idiotic mistake on my part, but I can't figure out how to use the google-api-php-client to do a simple search. My goal is to run simple keyword queries against a google search engine for my site.
I've created my api key, a google search engine and downloaded a release of the api client, but the google site for the php client doesn't seem to have any documentation on how to use the client and the only related example I've found so far specifically searches google's book service. The problem is that example implies that different search services have different search result types and I can't find any documentation on how to retrieve results from a Google_Service
.
I think I can set up a simple search like this, but I don't know how to actually retrieve the results.
include_once __DIR__ . '/vendor/autoload.php';
...
public function __construct($searchTerm) {
$client = new Google_Client();
$client->setApplicationName("My_First_Search");
$client->setDeveloperKey(self::GCSE_API_KEY);
$service = new Google_Service($client);
$optParams = array('filter' => $searchTerm);
$results = $service->???
The documentation must be out there, but it's not in any of the obvious places....
(Update 1/21/17: actually, these docs didn't help me much, but I'll leave them up just FYI)
I used phpdoc to generate api documentation for the google apiclient
. I made a repo and put the phpdocs and the libary on github. The phpdocs are browsable here.
So hopefully that will be helpful to someone. Unfortunately even with the docs I'm having trouble unraveling proper usage. I haven't generated docs for the google apiclient-services package yet because they are huge, but I can do that if necessary (depending on disk limits on github pages).
Google APIs give you programmatic access to Google Maps, Google Drive, YouTube, and many other Google products. To make coding against these APIs easier, Google provides client libraries that can reduce the amount of code you need to write and make your code more robust.
Custom Search JSON API requires the use of an API key. An API key is a way to identify your client to Google. After you have an API key, your application can append the query parameter key=yourAPIKey to all request URLs. The API key is safe for embedding in URLs, it doesn't need any encoding.
Go to the Google Maps Platform > Credentials page. On the Credentials page, click Create credentials > API key. The API key created dialog displays your newly created API key.
From the Programmable Search Engine homepage, click Create a custom search engine or New search engine. In the Sites to search box, type one or more sites you want to include in the search results. You can include any sites on the web, even sites you don't own. Don't worry, you can always add more later.
Thanks to @gennadiy for putting me on the right track. Without his suggestion to use ->cse->listCse()
to retrieve the results, I probably would have given up and gone in search of a different library. Luckily this is pretty much all I need to use this library for so I think I'm all set.
Executing a search is pretty simple; it basically looks like this:
include_once __DIR__ . '/vendor/autoload.php';
$GCSE_API_KEY = "nqwkoigrhe893utnih_gibberish_q2ihrgu9qjnr";
$GCSE_SEARCH_ENGINE_ID = "937592689593725455:msi299dkne4de";
$client = new Google_Client();
$client->setApplicationName("My_App");
$client->setDeveloperKey($GCSE_API_KEY);
$service = new Google_Service_Customsearch($client);
$optParams = array("cx"=>self::GCSE_SEARCH_ENGINE_ID);
$results = $service->cse->listCse("lol cats", $optParams);
The results object implements Iterator so we can loop over them as follows:
foreach($results->getItems() as $k=>$item){
var_dump($item);
}
In order to use this library though, you will have to set up a few google things first. These things are eventually mentioned on the Google API Client Libraries PHP (Beta) website, but you'll have to click around & dig for them and even then, you'll miss the last one below:
This is a more realistic example than the example above. It is still very simple, but it's always nice to have something new explained in two different ways with lots of explanatory comments.
<?php
include_once __DIR__ . '/vendor/autoload.php';
/**
* Retrieves a simple set of google results for a given plant id.
*/
class GoogleResults implements IteratorAggregate {
// Create one or more API keys at https://console.developers.google.com/apis/credentials
const GCSE_API_KEY = "nqwkoigrhe893utnih_gibberish_q2ihrgu9qjnr";
/* The search engine id is specific to each "custom search engine"
* you have configured at https://cse.google.com/cse/all
* Remember that you must have enabled Custom Search API for the project that
* contains your API Key. You can do this at the following url:
* https://console.developers.google.com/apis/api/customsearch.googleapis.com/overview?project=vegfetch-v01&duration=PT1H
* If you fail to enable the Custom Search API before you try to execute a search
* the exception that is thrown will indicate this. */
const GCSE_SEARCH_ENGINE_ID = "937592689593725455:msi299dkne4de";
// Holds the GoogleService for reuse
private $service;
// Holds the optParam for our search engine id
private $optParamSEID;
/**
* Creates a service object for our Google Custom Search. The API key is
* permiently set, but the search engine id may be changed when performing
* searches in case you want to search across multiple pre-prepared engines.
*
* @param string $appName Optional name for this google search
*/
public function __construct($appName = "My_Search") {
$client = new Google_Client();
// application name is an arbitrary name
$client->setApplicationName($appName);
// the developer key is the API Key for a specific google project
$client->setDeveloperKey(self::GCSE_API_KEY);
// create new service
$this->service = new Google_Service_Customsearch($client);
// You must specify a custom search engine. You can do this either by setting
// the element "cx" to the search engine id, or by setting the element "cref"
// to the public url for that search engine.
//
// For a full list of possible params see https://github.com/google/google-api-php-client-services/blob/master/src/Google/Service/Customsearch/Resource/Cse.php
$this->optParamSEID = array("cx"=>self::GCSE_SEARCH_ENGINE_ID);
}
/**
* A simplistic function to take a search term & search options and return an
* array of results. You may want to
*
* @param string $searchTerm The term you want to search for
* @param array $optParams See: For a full list of possible params see https://github.com/google/google-api-php-client-services/blob/master/src/Google/Service/Customsearch/Resource/Cse.php
* @return array An array of search result items
*/
public function getSearchResults($searchTerm, $optParams = array()){
// return array containing search result items
$items = array();
// Merge our search engine id into the $optParams
// If $optParams already specified a 'cx' element, it will replace our default
$optParams = array_merge($this->optParamSEID, $optParams);
// set search term & params and execute the query
$results = $this->service->cse->listCse($searchTerm, $optParams);
// Since cse inherits from Google_Collections (which implements Iterator)
// we can loop through the results by using `getItems()`
foreach($results->getItems() as $k=>$item){
var_dump($item);
$item[] = $item;
}
return $items;
}
}
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