Is there a way to programmatically access Google's search engine results?

Question

Does google offer a way to programmatically see their search engine results for a certain query?

I want to build a tracking application so that a user can see what rank on the google results their website is for certain keywords.

EDIT: The behavior of the program would be: every day the program queries Google for the desired phrases, sees what position the user's websites are, and emails the users an update of their positions for their phrases.

I want to be sure to comply with Google's terms of service too.

Answer 1

After finding this question I have been researching as the other answers seem out of date.

The Google search API would be the obvious choice as quoted by other users however it is now been deprecated in favour of Custom Search API.

Although not obvious at first the Custom Search API does allow you to search the entire web. However the bad news is that the order of the results are not the same as a regular web search.

In conclusion it used to be possible however it is no longer. The new API (at a cost) will allow you to search the web to you will not be able to get the ranking back as required.

Answer 2

I know the question is Google specific, but it doesn't hurt to try out other search engines which might be more open to API integration.

Check out DuckDuckGo's API.