This is another not so useful script of mine. It is a Bash script and it gathers the search results counts via Google/Yahoo/Bing APIs to make an historical chart of specified keyword using the Annotated Timeline (with no annotations, :-))of Google Visualization API.

I made this script, search-result-count.sh, because I wanted to have a historical chart of this keyword livibetter. Yep, I searched my nickname regularly, I admit it! I like watching the number of result climbing up, which would make me feel better. :-D

I wasn't planning of using Yahoo and Bing because their APIs require AppIDs, the IDs will be out to apparently public if I use Bash to write this. I don't like it, but I couldn't resist to see the result counts from them.

Because it is still new, I could not have much data to show you. The following chart was collected about two weeks. (Bing results was not included)



The following is the screenshot of rendered HTML page:

I googled myself and made a chart. on Twitpic

Please aware of few things if you want to use this script:
  • You can use cron to run it regularly, several times a day. Don't worry, it will only update the data file once a day.
  • It will only update when three counts from three search engine are available. If any of them couldn't return the result, you may have a missing data. But it should be okay, the counts do not change much from day to day.