Everybody likes hot content. That’s why Google Trends is so popular among blackhats. It says what’s hot and what’s not. So let’s scrap!
Why care about trends?
Traffic. If you know the keywords people use when they search, you can bring more traffic to your websites. If you know the hot keywords, you can bring HUGE traffic. Those who just don’t get it,
Google Hot Trends = Hot keywords
Google Hot Trends RSS scraper
Pluses
- Google doesn’t mind RSS scraping.
- Easy to automate.
Minuses
- You can’t specify a date.
<?php $page = file_get_contents( 'http://www.google.com/trends/hottrends/atom/hourly'); preg_match_all('(<a href="(.+)">(.*)</a>)siU', $page, $matches); // Job’s done! // $matches[1] array contains all URLs, and // $matches[2] array contains all anchors ?> |
Scraping Google Hot Trends website
Pluses
- You can specify dates.
Minuses
- Proxy usage is desirable. I use the getPage function (from Scraping websites with PHP cURL under proxy) in the code sample below.
- Simple date formatting is required if you want to specify a date. For example, yesterday’s (April 20, 2009) hot trends – http://www.google.com/trends/hottrends?sa=X&date=2009-4-20. But it’s not a problem when you scrap today’s hot trends http://www.google.com/trends/hottrends?sa=X.
<?php // Scraping New Year’s Eve $result = getPage( '[proxy IP]:[port]', 'http://www.google.com/trends/hottrends?sa=X&date=2008-12-31', 'http://www.google.com/trends/hottrends?sa=X', 'Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.9.0.8) Gecko/2009032609 Firefox/3.0.8', 1, 5); if (empty($result['ERR'])) { preg_match_all( '(<td class=num>\d+\.</td>.*<td><a href="(.*)">(.*)</a></td>)siU', $result['EXE'], $matches); // some URL tuning here… for ($i = 0; $i < count($matches[1]); $i++) { $matches[1][$i] = 'http://www.google.com' . $matches[1][$i]; } // Job's done! // $matches[1] array contains all URLs, and // $matches[2] array contains all anchors } else { // WTF? Captcha or network problems? // ... } ?> |
Take care!

Darwin Studios is ready to pay $75 for Google Hot trends scraper http://www.scriptlance.com/projects/1242054657.shtml
Bidding Ends 5/15/2009 at 11:10 EST. Go ahead blackhats!
Hey, what the mean of scraping?