Hi, Becky,
Some good news and some bad news, and two pieces of what may be
goodish news for you. The good news is that there is software called
Googlis, available at <http://www.googlis.com/>, which claims " People
use Googlis for market research, making reports from search results in
a specific web sector or for 'power searching'. Googlis has two
strengths - it can do multiple searches but show this as one set of
results (this can get rid of the cancelling effects of word order and
alternate spellings) - and secondly it can export these search results
to CSV format (which means you can use Microsft Excel or Access to
produce reports, graphs, etc)."
That sounds as if it is just what you want. The free/ unregistered
version is limited to 15 exports at one time: registration costs
$20.00 and gives you unlimited export ability.
The bad news: Googlis appears to be unavailable: click on the download
link and you get a "The page cannot be found" message. I found
several software download sites which have Googlis listed - but they
all (so far) send you back to Googlis itself and that cannot find page
message.
The dates given are fairly recent, and it could be that the download
page is temporarily unavailable and will be reposted soon. If the
software has been withdrawn, why remove just the download page (I ask
myself), why not remove the whole site? So there may be hope there.
The goodish news (1): an intermediate solution for you. Have you
thought about setting your preferences to 100 (click on Preferences on
Google search or results screen, scroll down to the number of results
dialog, click on the triangle and click on 100). Now when you do a
Google search, just use File >> Save As (or File >> Save Page As,
depending on what browser you are using - and there may be other
variations on that as well. Once you have saved the results page, go
to the next 100 results and so on, until you reach the end of Google's
results listings.
Now that may sound like a lot of saved searches - but in fact there
will be only 8 or 9 files per search. That is because Google posts
only the top 860 or so hits, regardless of how many million results it
found.
Now you can go back when you want to, open those html saved searches
in your browser, analyse as you will. It's not a csv/ excel file, but
you did say it does not have to be excel, access or word.
Goodish news (2): if you are into Perl, then Google Hack #44
"Scraping Google Results: Scraping the results of a Google search into
a comma-delimited file" might work for you. I say "might", because
there is some discussion on the page, it doesn't work for everyone and
there may be misprints in the coding. You will find the hack at
<http://hacks.oreilly.com/pub/h/164>
I cannot post this as an answer because my first suggestion does not
meet all your requirements, and the second suggestion, the hack, may
not work (but keep checking the hacks page, someone may come up with a
solution). Or the Googlis download may be available again. So if you
are happy with any of these approaches, then feel free to say so and I
will post this as an answer.
I do hope there is a neat answer to the problem - this could be a very
useful tool. Good luck! r2l |
