Interesting, thanks for the suggestion. I haven't yet checked out the Google modules on CPAN, although I really must get round to doing it rather than just screen-scraping, as I do use Google pretty extensively in my work (journalist). In fact O'Reilly has a new book called Google Hacks which is coming out soon, and I believe quite a bit of the code in it will be in Perl.

OK, here's a quick rewrite using SOAP::Lite instead of screen-scraping. Now I'm off to install Net::Google and DBD::google to see what they can offer!

#!/usr/bin/perl
use warnings;
use strict;

use SOAP::Lite;
my $key = 'xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx';

die "Usage: goolies2 word1 word2\n" unless @ARGV;

foreach my $query (@ARGV) {
    my $googleSearch = SOAP::Lite->service("file:GoogleSearch.wsdl");
    my $result = $googleSearch->doGoogleSearch($key, $query, 0, 10, "f
+alse", "", "false", "", "latin1", latin1");
    print "$query returned about $result->{'estimatedTotalResultsCount
+'} results.\n";
}

__END__

sample output:
heather nova returned about 136000 results.
sheryl crow returned about 238000 results.
avril lavigne returned about 463000 results.
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