Get Altavista number of hits

Question

Hello, I need a program that -Given a search query- uses altavista and returns the number of hits for this search query. I prefer java but other languages are fine with me. Is there an API that can be used for this purpose?

Answer 1

This should be simple...

1. Make a web request to Altavista passing in your search query.
2. Get the resulting HTML back.
3. Then parse out the hit count from the html.

Answer 2

You could adapt the code here:

http://nadeausoftware.com/node/73

Which will allow you to specify a URL to search for, get the results and parse out the returned number of matches all in Java

Altavista does not have a search API and I could not locate an up-to-date third-party solution.