Github Repository: Fork It! Code: [ Download ] Demo: [ Try it out ]

EDIT 2012-05-31: I have updated the code to work with the latest source generated by Google Images, so it works again. Being that this is a scraper, I cannot make an guarantees that it will continue to operate correctly in the future. If you see any issues, let me know and I will do my best to patch accordingly.

Sometime ago, I found myself wanting to be able to programatically perform a Google image search (it was for album art on the music page). As Google does not provide an API for backend scripting, I wrote a quick scraper that does the job quite nicely. Hit the break for info on how to use this.

include ('gis.php');
$results = googleImageSearch('chobits');
print_r($results);

Here's the function prototype:

googleImageSearch($query, $page = 1, $size = GIS_ANY, $type = GIS_ANY);

This returns an array of stdObject with the following properties:

• resultLink - Link to Google image result. This is the page that displays when you click a result through normal image search
• source - URL of the source image
• title - Title associated with the image
• width - Width of the image
• height - Height of the image
• size - Size of the image
• type - Format of the image (jpg, png, etc)
• domain - Domain of source image
• thumb - stdObject with information on Google's thumbnail of the image. Properties are:
• thumb->src - URL to the thumbnail
• thumb->width - Width of the thumbnail
• thumb->height - Height of the thumbnail

Size constants are (all fairly self-explanatory):

• GIS_LARGE
• GIS_MEDIUM
• GIS_SMALL

And constants for type:

• GIS_FACE
• GIS_PHOTO
• GIS_CLIPART
• GIS_LINEART

If you have any comments, questions or issues with this code, just leave a comment below and I'll do my best to help you!